During an interview with the reporters at the Gabba on Tuesday one day before India begin their tour of Australia with the first T20I, the Indian skipper Virat Kohli was asked how he viewed the four Test matches that follow in December – a clear sign that these three T20Is are being widely viewed as a tiny appetizer before the main course.
The Indian team is currently standing at the no.1 position in the ICC Test Championship, but this year lost series in South Africa 1-2 and in England 1-4. Now they are going to lock horns with Australia, where no Indian team has won a Test series in Australia, and there are many former Indian and Australian cricketers who believe that the upcoming series between is the best chance that to win a Test series on Australian soil. On the other hand, After the bans of Steve Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft for their roles in the ball-tampering scandal, Australia’s batting has seen a huge downfall.
Talking about the upcoming series and correcting the past mistakes, Kohli said, “Whatever series we play, our aim is to win that series. We’ve figured out our mistakes in England, which as I’ve mentioned before were very radical. The quality of cricket was very high but our mistakes were as radical which is why we lost the games. The game that we committed lesser mistakes in, we won that one. We have the ability to keep competing with the other team, at par, and in Test cricket whichever team makes fewer mistakes wins the game. We’re focusing on cutting down our mistakes. If a situation goes bad for us, how to plug that situation as soon as possible and find an outcome from that situation.”
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This is Kohli’s third Test tour to Australia, has been their top run-getter in 2011-12 when in his first year of Test cricket (he made 300 runs in four Tests) and then putting up a record 692 runs at 86.50, with four centuries, in 2014-15.
On that last tour, Virat led in the first Test when MS Dhoni was injured and since then, India has reached the no.1 position in Tests and Kohli has scored runs across the globe. From a team perspective, the batting has fallen drastically away from home the but the bowling has gained, with South Africa bowled out in each of the three Tests in January and in England, they took all 10 wickets on seven of nine occasions this summer.
Describing the same, Kohli said, “We played good cricket the last time but we weren’t able to win games, so this time around we definitely want to change that. We definitely believe we have the quality to do so but it’ll boil down to how we think in each moment in every Test match that we play. Our limited-overs form has been good and we want to just continue that as a whole throughout the tour. We want to do the little things right and have our focus really precise so that we can win more situations than the opposition.”
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The Indian skipper also praised the efforts of Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jasprit Bumrah as a new-ball pair in limited-overs cricket while considering himself “lucky” to be able to call on their skills. Earlier, it has been reported that Virat has asked about resting Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar during the IPL to keep them in top shape for the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup in England, but a day before the start of the T20Is series with Australia in Brisbane, the captain spoke of how tough it is to drop the successful pair when on the road.
In T20Is, Bumrah is India’s leading fast bowler with 33 wickets from 28 games followed by Hardik Pandya with 24 from 26, Bhuvneshwar with 18 from 18. However, with the wrist-spinning pair of Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal finding success, the options have been further limited for Indian quicks to break into the XI.
Talking about the same, Virat explained, “If the other side wins a game or two then you still go and back on Bhuvi and Bumrah. Both of them have been outstanding, they are thinking bowlers and understand the situation and get a gut feeling of what a batsman is looking to do before they bowl. Sometimes they will get dominated as everyone does, but I think 85-90 percent of the time they are spot on and that’s because they are always looking at how the game’s going. I’ve been very lucky to have both of them bowling so well for the team and giving us those breakthroughs … in difficult situations, at the death, they’ve been brilliant.”
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Kohli outlined the fact that with such success as a pair, chances of other fast bowlers getting a chance leading up to the World Cup will be tough. India will play three ODIs in Australia in January then move to New Zealand for a full series before returning home to face Australia before the IPL.
