Rahul Dravid wants young batters to embrace challenge of playing on tough pitches | Cricket News – Times of India

AHMEDABAD: At a time when young opener Shubman Gill, Shreyas Iyer and KS Bharat are trying to cement their place in the Test team, the challenging nature of pitches for the Test series against Australia has only made the task tougher for them.
The 23-year-old Gill, who replaced out-of-form KL Rahul in the third Test, scored 21 and 5 while Shreyas Iyer has scored a sum of 42 runs in four innings. Wicketkeeper-batsman Bharat has looked neat behind the stumps but has only managed 57 runs in the five innings he has come out to bat.
India coach Rahul Dravid, however, said he had a realistic view about what a good performance is under these testing circumstances. “It’s really about being realistic about what is a good performance on some of the challenging wickets we are playing on, not only here,” he said on Tuesday.

“If you look at the last three-four years, all over the world I think wickets have got a lot more challenging, not only here. So, you must be realistic about what the benchmarks are now, what the standards are.
“Just understanding that in these kinds of games, just one good performance can change the game. We saw that with Rohit Sharma’s performance (where he scored a hundred at Nagpur), we’ve seen that many times over here. It’s just being realistic in our assessment of our batsmen, their averages and their numbers, and don’t really look so much into it.”

Dravid feels the youngsters in the team need to use the opportunity to do “something special”.
“Just backing our batsmen to understand that these are challenging conditions and they’re the same for both sides. And for them to be able to use it as a challenge and an opportunity to do something special. It might not necessarily be about scoring big double-hundreds, but you know there might be scores of 50-60 or scores of 60-70 somewhere, which might be really, good scores in some conditions,” Dravid said.