“I don’t like to go down without a fight,” says Ravichandran Ashwin

R Ashwin, who batted crucially in India’s nail-biting triumph against Bangladesh at Mirpur on Sunday (December 25), tried to downplay his importance but stressed that he would not have gone down without a fight. His man-of-the-match performance featured an unbeaten 42 in an unbroken 71-run eighth-wicket partnership with Shreyas Iyer that drew similarities to the side’s more established batsmen.

“Oh no,” he said, unwilling to be compared to the other hitters. “It was simply my day,” he explained to reporters.

The Indian dressing room was nervous, according to skipper KL Rahul, as the batters negotiated a challenging surface and marauding Bangladesh spinners while chasing a hard 145-run mark. However, Ashwin confessed that he was oblivious of the tensions and placed his faith in things over which he had control.

“I sat outside of the dressing room and had no idea what was happening inside. I am an anxious observer of other people’s hitting, but once I have the ball or bat in my hands, I always assume I can manage things.”

Following the game, Ashwin congratulated Iyer for managing the situation expertly. “It was one of those games when we let it wander when we might have turned it off. Shreyas batted well. Sometimes you feel like you have to go ahead of things in these circumstances, they bowled terrific lines, and I felt like we didn’t trust our defences enough. I liked how Shreyas batted,” he explained to the host broadcaster.

Ashwin, a proven match-winner with the ball, has recently wriggled India out of tight situations with the bat twice, most notably against Pakistan at the MCG in the Twenty World Cup, where he held his nerves in a pressure-cooker-like situation and made sure India beat their arch-rivals in a last-ball win.

“I don’t like giving up without a fight. I’ve always put myself in difficult circumstances since I was eight years old. So I strive to battle every day, and I, like the rest of my squad, dislike losing. “These are the two times where I came out on top,” he remarked, adding, “I’m really delighted.”