Watch: Ravichandran Ashwin reveals his game plan

A guileful six-wicket effort from strike bowler Ravichandran Ashwin saw India continue to maintain a strong grip on New Zealand at the end of third day’s play in the final Test in Indore on Monday. Riding on Ashwin’s brilliant figures of 6/81, India bowled out New Zealand for 299, thereby helping India gain a healthy first-innings lead of 258 runs.

In the post match conference, Ashwin spoke at length about the game plan he normally has when bowling to batsmen. Ashwin says he tries to study the batsmen and employ different strategies to get better of them.

“Once I get into that good rhythm, I think that I can beat any batsman in the world. That’s where I stand right now. It also matters to sort it out. I came into the series with a plan, especially taking off from when Kane Williamson got out in Bangalore when they came last year. he lunged forward and got out at slips. That’s one of the things that I thought I will repeat”

#TeamIndia bowler @ashwinravi99 on how he plotted Williamson's dismissals #INDvNZ pic.twitter.com/3kE0iYuYwn

— BCCI (@BCCI) October 10, 2016

Ashwin also summarised his performance in the post-match interview. He said, “I look to get a five-for, as a batsman looks to get a hundred. You also need the help of other bowlers not to pick up wickets to get five-fors as often as I do,” said Ashwin with a cheeky smile. “I don’t find my rhythm very quickly in any of these spells in this series.”

“Once I settled in, the body starts going into the ball, and that was one of those spells [after lunch] Got to give credit to the way Rahane is pulling off those catches, staying low. [His run outs of the non-striker] The second one was not intentional. It was actually bad that I dropped the catch. We are just trying to give it a better chance to wear down. It’s a quality wicket. Hoping it gives us a little more ammunition”