Rohit Sharma-led Team India are on the verge of qualifying for the World Test Championship final in England and they are ready to take on Australia in the third Test of the ongoing series at Indore starting Wednesday (March 1). Meanwhile, if India reach the marquee final starting on June 7, they are expected to have less than 10 days to prepare in the build-up to the game with IPL 2023 running until the end of May as well.
“There is definitely a possibility of that,” Rohit Sharma said on the eve of the Indore Test. “We have already spoken about it. We need to get the guys ready for it. The important one is Shardul Thakur, because he comes into the planning for us. We don’t know how ready he is since he has just gotten married. We don’t know how many overs he has bowled. But that thought process is definitely there. If we do what we do here and get the result we want, we might think of doing something different in Ahmedabad for sure.”
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“Just speaking of it from the outside… I don’t think England is going to qualify, so both teams who are going to play the final will be neutral teams. It’s going to be exciting. There’s no home advantage, no conditions advantage. You know India has played a lot of cricket in England over the last couple of years. Australia have also played a lot of cricket there. Sri Lanka and South Africa are also in the mix. They probably have played a lot of cricket there as well. It’s not going to be alien conditions as such [to those] who’ll make the final. It’ll be a good contest between the two teams, whoever those teams are,” he again shared.
While there is hope for the final, Rohit Sharma was quick in changing his focus back to the present. He did, however, say that qualifying for two straight Test Championship finals would represent a huge achievement amid these challenging pitches.
“It will be a great achievement. After the last WTC championship, the way we played in certain conditions has been remarkable,” the Indian captain said. “Yes, these are our home conditions [in this series] but they are challenging conditions that we are playing. It is not easy for the batters to come out and keep scoring runs consistently. Because these are some challenging pitches we are playing on. So yeah, it’ll be a great achievement for us. But we know that we need to cross that final hurdle and for that we need to win this next game as well, so the focus is on this Test and how we can win this game and not look too far ahead. After this, we have one more Test to be played and then there’s two months of IPL.”
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“There’s a lot of time to think about the final but right now it is very important for us to focus on this game and see how we can turn it around and win this game as well. Because, in the last game we were put under pressure for sure, so we can expect the same here as well, we need to be ready for that,” Rohit Sharma concluded.
