England opener Keaton Jennings said he was “cool” with Indian skipper Virat Kohli’s ‘mic drop’ celebration after his teammate Joe Root’s dismissal in the opening Test at Edgbaston.
Kohli’s celebration of Root’s dismissal with a ‘mic drop’ gesture, mocking the bat drop by the Englishman to celebrate a hundred during the One-day International series, added a bit of spice to the proceedings on Wednesday.
Kohli ran out Root (80) with a direct hit when the England captain and Jonny Bairstow were attempting to pull off a risky second run. “It’s fine. Everybody is entitled to celebrate how they want to. He celebrated, and that’s cool,” Jennings said at the end of day’s play, playing down the incident.
Reflecting on the English batting, which collapsed from 216/4 to 285/9 at stumps, Jennings said the hosts missed an opportunity to put on a big score. Ravichandran Ashwin was the star for India with figures of 4/60. “If we can come out and be pretty relentless in the way we go about hitting our areas, at some point, you don’t actually know what a good score is until both sides have batted,” Jennings said.
Jennings lauded Root for his knock, the end of which triggered the home team’s slump in the final session of the day’s play. “Root played fantastically well. The way he goes about constructing his innings, builds it, communicates with me as a young cricketer, it is absolutely phenomenal. Having batted with him today, he’s taught me a hell of a lot, which is awesome, just to watch a master at his work.
“He’s a fantastic player, fantastic guy and to watch him go about building a Test innings on a pretty tough surface was pretty good. I suppose it’s pretty disappointing for him personally not to go on and get a really big score,” he said.
With Alastair Cook falling cheaply, Jennings put on 72 runs with Root but fell after lunch when he was distracted by a pigeon on the adjacent pitch one ball earlier. “I obviously made an error, misjudged the ball, and it ended up in my stumps, and that’s the way it is. I don’t blame the pigeon at all,” he quipped.
“Thirty overs before, people were standing up behind the bowler’s arm, you could say that distracted me as well. You re-focus, go through your own method, your own process between each ball. I wouldn’t say it distracted me at all. It just happens to be the ball before I got out, and suddenly there’s a huge hoo-hah about the pigeon,” the South Africa-born southpaw added.
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