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'We would have loved to bat on that wicket'

Greg Chappell has said that "experience and knowledge of the conditions" had been one of the reasons for picking Sourav Ganguly for the first Test of the series at Lahore



"We didn't get as many wickets as we would have liked, and whatever we tried didn't work." © AFP
Greg Chappell has said that "experience and knowledge of the conditions" had been one of the reasons for picking Sourav Ganguly for the first Test of the series at Lahore. He also termed the pitch as one of the best batting wickets he had seen, admitting that India would have loved to have batted on it, but gave credit to the Pakistan batsmen for putting up a splendid show.
The talk on the morning of the game, before the toss, centred around the animated discussion between Chappell, Ganguly and Rahul Dravid out on the field but Chappell dead-batted the issue while addressing the press conference at the end of the day: "We were talking about cricket. It's something we normally do and that's all we were doing. I don't know where these stories emerge from." When asked about both the specialist openers being benched, he said that the team had decided to go with their "best batting order" and, expectedly, didn't reveal the opening combination.
While calling it a "tough day at the office", Chappell spoke about the advantage of batting first. "We would have loved to bat on that wicket," he said about a track which yielded as many as 160 runs in boundaries. "Most teams would have struggled to bowl on it. I've seen a few wickets and this was one of the better batting wickets I have seen."
Admitting that the bowling wasn't up to scratch, he spoke about India's helplessness throughout the day. "We didn't get as many wickets as we would have liked," he said, "and whatever we tried didn't work. We toiled manfully but found the going very hard. We didn't bowl well in the final session but credit must go to the batsmen. They put the pressure on us and we didn't have the resources to respond."
However, he felt that the pitch would change it's complexion over the course of the next few days, hoping that his bowlers could pull it back tomorrow. "It will surely change over the five days," he continued. "Batting on the last two days will be tougher than batting on the first three." That, though, might not be a prediction that India will want to believe. With a chance of Pakistan piling up a mountain of runs, batting last on this pitch may not be the most inviting of propositions.

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan is staff writer of Cricinfo