The Indian skipper Virat Kohli clarified during his press conference on the eve of the fourth Test of the five-match series in Southampton that R Ashwin has recovered from his hip injury and is fit to take the field on Thursday. He also hinted that Team India might go with an unchanged squad despite the fact that he has tinkered with the playing XI in each of the last 38 Tests.
India has chopped and changed their teams for the last 45 Tests, with Kohli has gone with 38 combinations in as many Tests. Talking about the same, he said, “Ashwin has recovered nicely. He had a good practice session yesterday. He is good to go. It has not always been the case of (making random) changes. There have been injuries as well, which have not been taking in to consideration. It has been a mix of both. Seeing the way things are right now we don’t feel we need to change anything.”
After the trailing the series by 0-2, the Indian team made an impactful comeback with a 203-run win in the third Test at Nottingham and Virat revealed that the team is ready to work even harder for the crucial game in Southampton as they are having the winning momentum into the fourth Test. He said that the team understands that they are in a very exciting position now as at one stage the visitors were on the verge facing a clean sweep.
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The Indian skipper demands his team to be relentless and ruthless and capitalize on the winning momentum. He said, “As cricketers, we understand when the Test match goes away from you and we spoke about recognizing that, making sure that we are relentless and ruthless in terms of capitalizing on those important moments, which we did in Nottingham. But also to understand that we will have to do that two more times for us to achieve the goal that we want to (of winning the series). England would want to come back strongly. We understand that and we will have to be even better with what we did in Nottingham to be able to get results our way.”
As per the recnet reports, the pitch at the Ageas Bowl seems to be a green top which will definitely assist the Indian pacers, who are in prime form. However, Kohli ruled out the possibility of an all-pace attack.
Talking about the bowling combination, Virat said, “If there is a pitch is like Johannesburg then you have no doubt whatsoever in playing an all out pace attack. But I don’t think this pitch is anywhere close to Johannesburg. The last time we played here the spinners came into play in the second innings. There were big footmarks. The surface is pretty hard. Once it wears out there can be big footmarks and spinners can get a lot in the second innings.”
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Praising the Indian fast bowler for their performances in 2018, Kohli said, “You feel very confident when you see bowlers doing very well. If you take 20 wickets, you will get a win or at least a draw. Instead of focussing on the batsmen, we’ve been focussing on the bowlers on how to take 20 wickets. That’s why we’ve playing with five bowlers for a long time now. We don’t think we are at a disadvantage when it comes to pace bowling. We think we are equal to any team in the world and if we play well, we can win anywhere.”
Kohli concluded by stating that the Indian batsmen, including him, don’t find the need to change the way they’ve played so far in this series. He feels that when the wicket is behaving totally different, every batsman has to be adaptive and they don’t believe in having pre-set notions about going out wanting to play a certain way.
