First innings batting was crucial: Indian skipper

After saving India’s blushes in the first Test with an unbeaten 49 in the first Test, skipper Virat Kohli bossed the second Test here with a bucketful of runs (167 and 81) and inspiring captaincy. A delighted Kohli shared his feelings after the match. Excerpts from his media interaction: 

On the importance of good first innings, either with ball or bat: First innings is quite important in India. In Rajkot too, the general feeling was that England played better cricket than us.

But once you put a total on the board, if there is nothing in the wicket, even then you feel pressure of the big runs. We saw that in this match too as we had a total of 450-460. So the batsmen know they cannot afford to make mistakes. And if you make mistakes, 3-4 wickets can fall in one session, so we were able to get 200 runs lead because of that. I think first innings is quite important, because afterwards it gets difficult.

On the role of fast bowlers on Indian wickets: That’s why we play five bowlers, we don't play only spinners because we understand their contribution is also important -- those few important wickets in between. Today (Mohammad) Shami got two.

Umesh (Yadav) gave us the important breakthrough in the first innings. Even in the first Test he bowled really well. It's great to have them bowl in short bursts. The good thing is that they are not getting desperate to pick up four and five wickets everytime. They understand the need to come in and give us those breakthroughs and they are pretty happy to play the role.

On importance of Cook’s wicket: Well again, it was a test of our patience. We knew that they are going to try and annoy us by playing like this and hope that we lose our cool, bowl with different plans and do too many things, which we did not. We maintained a similar field throughout.

It's just that in the last over, the suggestion came from (Cheteshwar) Pujara that we could try probably a different field, have two more on the leg-side and make him really defend well in the last six balls. Put a bit of doubt in his head, and it worked. It was a pretty crucial dismissal for us in the game and it really set the tone for us this morning.