The three-day, warm-up match between India and the Sri Lanka Board President's XI at the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo may have ended in a draw, but it did give the Indian skipper Virat Kohli some vital takeaways.
One of the most important is Rohit Sharma's inconsistency in the longest format of the game and his batting position.
Sharma managed to score only 15 runs in two innings in the game (7 runs in the first innings and 8 in the second). He came out to open in the second innings but it has failed big time.
However, batting coach Sanjay Bangar is of the opinion that Sharma should bat at No.3 position and India would need his 'flair factor' in order to score more than 300 runs in a day in the upcoming Test matches.
"I think what he definitely brings at No 3 is the flair factor. With the kind of cricket that this team is looking to play, wherein we are wanting to at least go past 300 on each batting day, that's where somebody of his [Rohit] calibre can chip in and contribute in that manner. Rohit is an experienced campaigner. He has been on the international scene for a long period and he is hitting a lot of balls in the nets.
"So whatever absence of time that he has not been able to spend out in the middle [a month-long break], we are spending time in the nets and he is hitting a lot of balls. He is batting really well. It's just a matter of time that he gets a decent start and looks to convert that into a big one," Bangar told reporters at the post-match press conference in Colombo on Saturday.
Skipper Virat Kohli has also been out of form for quite some time now in this format of the game. The last time he was in red-hot form in Tests was in Australia where he scored four centuries in five matches; he would want to emulate that sort of form in the India-Sri Lanka series.
Wicketkeeper batsman Wriddhiman Saha also failed to impress.
But Bangar played the failures down, saying he was happy with the way the boys played in the warm up game in Colombo.
"In life, we believe that we learn every day and obviously these innings must have taught each of the individual batsmen some lessons. They would have assessed the kind of wickets we are going to encounter, the pace of the wickets and the shots you are going to go and apply in the Test matches. I think those are definitive learnings for the batsmen derived from these two innings," said Bangar.
