Wankhede pitch pretty similar to 2012 track: Ashwin

Mumbai: India’s striker bowler Ravichandran Ashwin feels that the current Wankhede pitch is pretty similar to the one on which they lost to England four years back.

“When we played (against) England last here, the morning of the first day wicket was a bit damp, it spun a little and it was absolutely flat on day 2 and 3.

I see very similar traits here. We got out of jail and got to 330-340 the last time we played them here,” said the off spinner after England had ended the day at 288 for 5.

“If we could have got one more wicket, we were on the course to do that (it would have been better), but probably we will come out tomorrow morning and try and snap couple of wickets and see how quickly we can stall their innings,” said the off-spinner, who grabbed 3 for 14 in a fantastic post-tea spell with his final analysis for the day being for 4 for 75.

Ashwin seemed satisfied with his post tea spell.

“I thought the rewards for that spell came for what I did in the afternoon session because I thought I bowled a really good spell then to (Keaton) Jennings and Moeen Ali and got (Joe) Root out.

I thought that was one of the better spells of the day and got rewards for it as soon as I came back in the third spell,” he said.

Ashwin said that Indian bowlers today failed to capitalise on the early morning mositure available from Wankhede track.

“Generally, Wankhede has been a big bat first and score big kind of a Test match always, so we knew that it will be up against the odds, generally there is some moisture in the morning and we wanted to capitalise on it and we couldn’t unfortunately.
PTI