India A’s Riyan Parag was off to a flyer on Day 1 of the second round of the Duleep Trophy. He was scoring at 37 off just 28 balls with five boundaries and a six, but a promising knock was cut short as he tried to cover drive one against Arshdeep Singh only to edge it to first slip.
Basit Ali Criticizes Riyan Parag
Parag had looked promising in the first round too, but made only 30 and 31 in both innings against India B, failing to consolidate on those starts. At Anantapur, another chance slipped away for Parag, which raised the hackles of former Pakistan cricketer Basit Ali. Basit took to his official YouTube channel to criticise Parag for not grabbing the opportunity to prove himself in Test cricket and indicated that the young player was too focused on the limited-overs formats.
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‘Focus On Prolonging Inning’: Basit Ali Opines On Parag
“He has a lot of talent, and he’s such an effortless player. He hit that straight six today over mid-off, it was top-class. But he isn’t justifying that talent. He has to play session by session. Just like (Shreyas) Iyer, he is also getting aggressive. I admit, you have to counter-attack, but once you succeed in that, you should focus on prolonging your innings,” Basit said.
“These are the days where Riyan Parag needs to capitalise and score big. There’s New Zealand series, then Australia series. Don’t focus on white-ball matches. You’ve got the no.4. In the previous match, he played aggressive, too. Here, you had already scored 30-35 runs, you can’t give your wicket like that. He has to take care of that. And the coaches need to talk to him, tell him this isn’t the way,” said Basit.
“His competition is against some very big players. We all know who are they; they’re going to retire in 2-3 years. He has to perform as much as he can.”
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Riyan Parag made his debut with the Indian Team in July during the T20I series against Zinbabwe. Following which he was selected in both T20I and ODI tour of Sri Lanka.
