India hope Pune rout acts as wake-up call

PUNE, India: India will be hoping that by the end of March their Pune capitulation can be viewed from the lofty heights of a seventh consecutive Test series triumph as an aberration that acted as a brutal wake up call to the world’s number one side.

The shell-shocked hosts have a week to regroup before they again engage an Australian touring party which made Virat Kohli and his team of world-beaters look quite ordinary in a 333-run first Test rout inside three days.

As they head south to Bengaluru, Kohli’s team will be forced to ponder the end of their hard-earned 19-Test unbeaten run and what their captain described as their worst batting performance in two years.

“I would say that we needed something like this for us to get a reality check and understand what are the things we need to work on and keep persisting with it, not take anything for granted at any stage, especially at the Test match level,” Kohli told reporters after the defeat.

Australia might be just below their hosts in the Test rankings but arrived in the country earlier this month having lost their last nine Tests in spin-friendly conditions in Asia.

They were swept 4-0 sweep the last time they played a series in India and had not won a Test since 2004 in what former captain Steve Waugh once called Australian cricket’s “Final Frontier”.