NEW DELHI: Indian batters were guilty of poor shot selection on a good batting track as pacer Marco Jansen used the short ball exceptionally well to reduce the hosts to 174 for 7 at lunch against South Africa on the third day of the second Test on Monday.

From a relatively comfortable 95 for 1 with Yashasvi Jaiswal cruising to an attractive fifty, things suddenly went downhill for the hosts, losing the next six wickets for 27 runs. India slumped to 122 for 7 in less than half an hour into the second session.

Sundar and Kuldeep resist amid top order collapse

India's newest crisis man Washington Sundar (33 batting, 66 balls) and the determined Kuldeep Yadav (14 batting, 82 balls) added 52 runs for the unbroken eighth wicket stand to avoid further embarrassment. But a 0 2 series defeat is not a far-fetched thought with two more days of play left.

The pitch had no demons in it but Jansen (4/43 in 17 overs), the man with a 6 feet 8 inch frame, extracted bounce that was disconcerting enough to trouble the Indian batters who were indiscreet in their shot selection.

Only KL Rahul (22) and Jaiswal after a 65-run stand got deliveries from Keshav Maharaj and Simon Harmer respectively that bounced from length. Rahul was forward leaning and apart from the extra bounce the turn also did him in with the ball pouched by first slip fielder.

In case of Jaiswal he had shaped to drive Harmer but then realised that the ball jumped awkwardly as he jabbed it with hard hands and Jansen at backward point dived forward to send him back to the dugout.

However the next three batters Dhruv Jurel (0), Sai Sudharsan (15) and Rishabh Pant (7) would like to forget the shots that they played in a real hurry.

Sudharsan who is unlikely to get any more chances in Test matches when it starts again after six months and one of the reasons will be refusing to learn from his mistakes. The manner in which he got out this day was identical to his dismissal in the first Test against the West Indies.

The ball from Harmer was slightly shortish on length and his immediate reaction was to rock back and play the pull. In Ahmedabad he was leg before missing the ball all over and in Guwahati the pull shot never had the elevation as Ryan Rickleton pulled off a fine catch at midwicket.

Jurel took the bait of a short ball outside the off-stump but the pace of the delivery was slower than expected. The resultant pull shot never got the desired elevation but what was really disturbing was the choice of shot with five minutes to go for lunch.

Rishabh Pant's careless act

The most disappointing was skipper Pant's dismissal despite knowing that the team is in doldrums. Knowing his propensity to charge down the track to pacers Jansen cleverly shortened the length further. Pant had jumped out for an ugly cross-batted hoick and the thin edge was taken by Kyle Verreynne behind the stumps.

Suddenly India were 102 for 5 and then Nitish Reddy and Ravindra Jadeja the two all-rounders were sorted by well-directed short balls delivered at the body by Jansen.

However some of the specialist batters could take a leaf out of Kuldeep's book as he defended well and allowed Washington to take bulk of the strike on a track where batting was not a challenge.

(With PTI Inputs)