The Indian Test specialist, Cheteshwar Pujara asserted that it was harder for him to prepare for the Test series in Australia with very little match practice due to restrictions occurred by the COVID-19 outrage. He failed to played any form of cricket for nearly 10 months in 2020 due to the COVID lockdown, barring the warm-up match in Sydney before diving straight into the Border-Gavaskar series in which he ended up as India’s second-highest run getter behind Rishabh Pant (274) with 271 runs with 3 half-centuries.

The Saurashtra batsman opened up on the difficulties he faced ahead of the Australia tour as he was the only one preparing for Test cricket while the rest of the Indian players were busy with the IPL 2020 in the UAE. Cheteshwar Pujara also expressed that he expected himself to don the colored jersey for India some day.

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Describing the difficulties during a chat on Sports Today, Pujara said, “I still have aspirations to play white-ball cricket for Team India, there’s no doubt about that. Yes, at the same time it becomes difficult when other guys are getting some match practice. After the lockdown I didn’t have any match practice before the Australia tour so to prepare for that big series it became a little difficult. But because of the COVID lockdown there were not many FC games which I could play.”

He further added, “I only played 1 game (warm-up match) before the Test series started so as a batter it was difficult to gain the rhythm, concentration. Early on it was difficult but as I started playing few more games, it took me a couple of Test matches to find the right way (to bat in Australia).”

Pujara, who scored nearly 500 runs on his last Test series Down Under, also praised the Aussie bowlers for executing their plans to the ‘T’ against him throughout the 4 Tests on this tour. Pujara was caught-behind 5 times out of the 8 innings that he batted in this series.

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Elaborating the same, Cheteshwar Pujara said, “Credit also goes to the Australian team because they did a lot of homework on what I did on the last series there. It wasn’t easy to break that gameplan but after a couple of Test matches I found my rhythm, concentration back, I trusted what I was doing and I was able to score runs in the last two Tests.”