“It’s [Pant’s dismissal] just happened, there hasn’t been any discussion about today,” Rohit said. “Obviously we’ve lost the game, everybody is disappointed about how things panned out … But again, look, Rishabh Pant obviously he needs to understand what is required from himself.
“More than any one of us telling him, it’s about him understanding and figuring out what’s the right way to go about it. In the past, he has given us lot of success doing what he does. As a captain, there’s a kind of mixed reaction to that.
“Sometimes you want to back that thought of him playing the way he plays, sometimes when things don’t look good, it frustrates everyone. That is what it is, that’s the reality. It’s the success and failure – need to be balanced about it. As captain, it’s hard to have a conversation when it has given him a lot of success as well. But it’s about him figuring out what is the right way to do things, it’s about situations as well. Certain situations of the game, if there’s a risk percentage, do you want to take that risk? Do you want to let the opposition come back into the game? Those are the things he needs to figure out himself.
“I’ve known Rishabh for a long time, [I] understand his cricket as well … In terms of conversations, no way I can say I’ve not had a chat with him or he doesn’t understand what the team expects. He understands that. But things that he does give him results as well, just the fine line between telling him not to do those things or telling him to do those things.”
“I had a chat with him [Gill]. There’s no way when you’re leaving someone out, for whatever reason it is, you will not have a chat,” Rohit said. “The chat with him was clearly he was not dropped. [We] just wanted to have extra bit of cushion in the bowling and we opted for an allrounder, which shouldn’t weaken our batting line-up.
“Compromising a batter for a bowler is not something I wanted to do. We wanted to bat as deep as possible, along with that have a bowling attack which can take 20 wickets. We considered everything and we ended up compromising him, unfortunately.
“With him [Gill], there was never a doubt that he wasn’t batting well or he was not scoring runs, or anything like that. Just to get that combination where we can cover both bases – batting and bowling, we opted for that [leaving Gill out].”
