4th Test: India need to work on both batting and bowling, says Dravid

Ahmedabad, March 8

India has to improve both in its batting and bowling during the fourth Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy as the team wants to win the match and qualify for the World Test Championship final without the help of others, said head coach Radhul Draivd on Tuesday.

India had won the first two Tests at Nagpur and New Delhi but lost the third in Indore and are leading the series 2-1 going into the fourth and final match of the series.

"We will have to work both on batting and bowling (departments). If you see the Indore Test, 109 runs in the first innings were not good enough. If we had scored 60-70 runs more, it would have been good. We also allowed them a few extra runs in the first innings in that situation and those conditions. So we will have to do better in both the areas of the game," Dravid said in a pre-match press conference here.

Asked how he as a coach judges the players' performances on challenging wickets, Dravid said he will have to be realistic about what is a good performance on such wickets.

"It's just really about being realistic about what is a good performance on some of the challenging wickets that we are playing on. Not only here, but I think over the last many matches. I mean I think if you look at the last three or four years all over the world, I think wickets have generally, you know I think, got a lot more challenging.

So you just have to be realistic about what the benchmarks are now, what the standards are, just understand that even in these kinds of games," he said.

A really good performance can change the game and we saw that with Rohit (Sharma in Nagpur). We've seen that many times over here. So yeah, I think it's just being realistic in our assessment of our batsmen and their averages and their numbers and we don't really look so much into it," he added.

--IANS