India assistant coach Abhishek Nair is hopeful that Sarfaraz Khan will continue his excellent domestic form in international cricket as well. The Mumbai batsman scored his first Test century in the first session of the fourth day being played against New Zealand on Saturday.
Sarfaraz started playing ahead of the 70 runs scored on Friday evening and along with Rishabh Pant, continued to try to get India out of trouble. This innings was significant as it was India's lowest score at home in Test cricket after India were bowled out for only 46 runs in the first innings.
Both the players together made a partnership of 113 runs, in which Pant scored his 12th Test half-century. After this rain stopped the game. At that time India had scored 344/3 in 71 overs and were 12 runs behind New Zealand.
“We know Sarfaraz Khan for centuries, double centuries and triple centuries,” Nair said in a video posted by BCCI on social media platform X (formerly Twitter). So I hope that at the end of the day we will see Sarfaraz Khan of domestic cricket playing in the same style at the international level and he will score a triple century.”
Even on Friday, Sarfaraz had made an important partnership of 136 runs with Virat Kohli (70), before Glenn Phillips dismissed Kohli on the last ball of the day.
Nair said, “Sometimes when the circumstances are against you, you expect Indian players to bounce back, and that is the spirit in our dressing room. “When you are in trouble, this tendency to fight comes naturally to us.” He further said, “If we play the first 15-20 overs without losing wickets, I think we can score 300-350 runs by the end of the day and then challenge New Zealand on the last day. The ideal situation would be to put 250 runs on the board and put New Zealand on the back foot.”
India's second assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate also praised the team's spirit after the big setback in the first innings. He said, “Today was a good day. We worked hard and played brilliantly till the last ball. Maybe it was a big turning point in the Test, but it means we have given ourselves a chance to get back into the match. No matter what the circumstances are, we find solutions and I think we did that today. It would have been easy to give up after such a huge deficit, but we didn't. “We feel like we are still in the game, and our team has shown a never-say-die attitude, that's our style.”
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