It was a collective failure: Rohit after series defeat

ROHIT Sharma said the reason behind the Pune loss was a 'collective failure'.

- SWAROOP SWAMINATHAN

In a near 30-minute press conference following the defeat by 113 runs, the skipper spoke on the series, where the faultlines lay and why there shouldn't be too much read into the performances of R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, who were outshone by the likes of Washington Sundar and Mitchell Santner. Excerpts...

On what went wrong
We didn't bat well in the first innings; we got only 150. The batters do understand that they failed to respond to the pressure, that challenge of playing on whatever pitch. The pitch was not bad at all; we just didn't play well enough to get close to their first innings score, and then obviously with 100 runs behind, we always knew that it was going to be challenging, whatever score we had to get because as the game went on, the pitch started behaving slightly differently.

On batting collapses