Cheteshwar Pujara, the Indian cricketer, is an integral part of the Indian test team as the batsman who bats mostly at no. 3 has given a lot of stability to the Indian batting. The Saurashtra cricketer has played many important innings in his international as well as domestic career but time and again, he gets criticised for his slow batting approach.
Recently, he helped his Saurashtra team in winning the Ranji trophy against Bengal and in this match, he played an innings of 66 runs for which he played 237 balls. After this innings, questions were again raised on his slow batting rate which has irked the right-handed batsman.
During an interview to a leading daily, Pujara has opened up on his batting style. He says that media may be talking about it in a different manner but the team management is supporting him completely. He also makes it clear that he is under no pressure to increase his batting rate by anyone whether it is coach, captain or anyone else.
The 32 years old cricketer says that the team management understands that it is his batting style and they have no problem with his strike-rate. He also states that often he is asked on social media as to why he plays so many balls to score X runs but such questions don’t matter to him and he is not disturbed because of them. As per him, his main aim is to ensure that his team wins all the matches and he is focused on that.
Cheteshwar Pujara adds that he knows he can’t bat like Virender Sehwag or David Warner but he also thinks that there is nothing wrong in taking some time on the crease before starting to score runs. He has played 77 test matches in which he has scored 5840 (18 hundreds) runs at an average of 48.7.
The cricketer also talks about the increasing interest of youngsters in the shorter formats. According to him, playing in the shorter formats is definitely better in monetary terms as the number of matches played with the white ball is certainly on the higher side in comparison to the number of matches played with the red ball.
Pujara further says that there is no problem if youngsters are interested in shorter formats but they should be aware of the fact that real cricket is test cricket and every cricketer is judged on the basis of his performance in the long format.
Every cricketer has his own style of playing and critics should not target Cheteshwar Pujara unnecessarily. What do you say?
