Down 0-2 in the five-Test series against India, England captain Alastair Cook feels his team needs to go back to the first match at Rajkot, where they played positive cricket to eke out a draw before losing the plot in the following two games.
Having lost the second and third Tests at Visakhapatnam and Mohali respectively, England need to win the fourth match to keep their chances alive in the series. And team's head coach Trevor Bayliss has been quoted by the English media that the players required to play with positive intent, a fact Cook insisted upon during his pre-match press conference here. "It's a clear message I knew was coming out (from Bayliss). We sat down at the end of the Mohali game and discussed how we wanted to play. We chatted at the end of that game and it's a very fair thing as part of the leadership group alongside Trevor and a couple of coaches," said the England skipper on the eve of the fourth Test here.
"Rajkot was our blueprint, we played really well there and we might have just slipped off a little bit in terms of that intent. Hopefully we can go back to that. It was just not Trevor saying," Cook added.
Cook wanted the team to forget about the slow batting indulged by himself and teenage opener Haseeb Hameed in the second innings of the Visakhapatnam Test. "We do have to take that second innings in Vizag out of it where we played that way. But I wonder whether that did kind of tie into the third game and there was a bit of hangover and we did go back into our shells a bit," he said.