Jennings confident England will make up

Ashwin is a very good bowler. He lands the ball in the right area, varies his pace, in India, I suppose there are more balls that can get you out, with the surfaces turning. He bowled nicely today

Keaton Jennings

birmingham — England opener Keaton Jennings’s beliefe that England can still make it up, despite missing an opportunity, seemed to be coming true on the second day.

“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 and the Indians were struggling with top order, except Virat Kohli managed only 65 runs.

Jennings on Wednesday lauded Root for his knock, the end of which triggered the home team collapse.

“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,” he laughed it off.

Ashwin took charge of the day’s proceedings for India. While Jennings praised the spinner, he couldn’t commit whether both teams were wrong in going with only one spinner in their line-ups.

“Ashwin is a very good bowler. He lands the ball in the right area, varies his pace, in India, I suppose there are more balls that can get you out, with the surfaces turning. He bowled nicely today (Wednesday),” he said.

“We come up with a gameplan to play off-spinners, left-handers — he bowled a good ball to Cook this morning, which maybe came down to a little bit of tackiness in the surface,” he added. —