Pathetic performance

Congratulations to Pat Cummins, who led his team from the front, to win the Melbourne Test and take a 2-1 lead in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series.

With this loss, we the Indian cricket fans have lost the "Bharosa" in our team playing the WTC Finals @ Lords next year. The performance of Rohit Sharma and his team, especially the seniors, was pathetic. Bumrah was the exceptional bowler, along with Nitish Reddy, Jaiswal & KL Rahul.

While the Australian players, including their No.10 and 11 could add vital runs, our top failed consistently.

At Melbourne too, while Lyon & Boland survived nearly 20 overs to pile our team agony to add 61 runs, our last 7 wickets could survive only 20 overs for just 34 runs.

In fact, right from the series against New Zealand in India, our senior players have been struggling to score runs, even in our own den against their spinners and Down Under to Pat Cummins’ pace men.

But for Bumrah's heroics with the ball and bat at Brisbane, and a century of Nitish Reddy here, we would have lost Brisbane and miserably at Melbourne. Added to our bowler’s woes was the dropped catches. While the Oz players caught even the most difficult catches, our players just dropped the easiest ones.

Here we felt the absence of Rahul Dravid, the real coach! Now that our dreams have been shattered and the Sydney Test is becoming inconsequential, we should play the Sydney Test without Rohit, Virat, Pant & Jadeja. Even Siraj, who failed time and again, could be benched.

Vinay Mahadevan,

Al Nahda, Dubai