Melbourne: Australian speedster Pat Cummins having the upper hand over Indian batting mainstay Cheteshwar Pujara is an area of concern for India but it is also symptomatic of batsmen finding it difficult to score runs throughout the series, former fast bowler Zaheer Khan has said.
Pujara, who scored 521 runs at an average of 74.42 on India’s previous tour of Australia in 2018, has been dismissed three out of four times by Cummins in the first two Tests of the four-match series. The batsman is yet to score a half-century.
“There is no doubt that it is a topic of concern. But it is similar to the way we were talking about Steve Smith, that he will get the feel, he said he found his grip in the one-dayers,” said Zaheer on Sony Sports Network.
“He has to figure out that thing because it was the same attack against whom he had scored three centuries in the last series. Yes, the angle of Cummins’s deliveries are troubling him and somewhere or the other I feel this is form-related.”
Zaheer said that Pujara may have to reconsider his trigger movement and could be helped by revisiting the 2018/19 tour.
“It could be the trigger movement; he might have to go back down memory lane and think about it. He just has to get that feel,” he said.
“Yes, if Pat Cummins had not played in the previous series and not exploited his weakness like this, then it would have been a different thing but he has played him in the last series and scored centuries when he was there.”
Commentators have often observed that Pujara has been felled by extremely good deliveries from Cummins, who is the top ranked Test bowler in the world. Zaheer feels that it is only a matter of time before the India’s Test batting stalwart comes good.
“I think it is a matter of time. We should see it from that viewpoint but at this moment, you can say that it has become a slight area of concern,” he said.
IANS