Kanpur. As soon as Team India’s practice session ended, it started raining at Green Park Stadium in Kanpur. However, just a day before the match, it was an optional practice session in which batsmen like captain Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill did not practice. Whereas experienced bowlers like Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj also remained missing from the field. But, the reason for this was also that every player sweated profusely during the practice session of about 3 hours on Wednesday. In recent times, it is quite interesting to see Rohit and Virat Kohli in the nets. It seems that a mountain of stress has been removed from the heads of both the players after the T20 World Cup. You will often see these two together and spend a lot of time laughing and joking.
It seems as if the era of 2008-10 has gone back when these two young players were trying to establish themselves in Team India. And they were being seen as very talented players. Another regular player of the same era, Gautam Gambhir is now the head coach of this team and you can often see him smiling in contrast to his serious image. Especially, when he was seen with his teammates. A similar scene was seen on the pitch just a day before the Test match when Gambhir and Rohit Sharma strolled towards bowling coaches Morne Morkel and Ravichandran Ashwin.
Later, when this writer asked Ashwin himself about that conversation on Ashwin’s Hindi YouTube channel, he jokingly avoided it. But, later he definitely told that for Morkel he was playing the role of translator for his young fast bowler Akash Deep. Ashwin also told how Morkel wanted to know from him how the spinners tighten the screws so well on Indian pitches.
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When Kohli, who practiced batting for about 40 minutes on Wednesday, reached the nets to bat on Thursday too, he was a bit surprised. Often, Kohli also rests during the optional nets session on the day before the match. But, the challenge on the slow-spin pitch of Kanpur may be different and for this Kohli may be working on a different strategy. By the way, on Wednesday, when Axar Patel bowled him with one of his spinning balls, he became happy like a child and even celebrated, on which Kohli laughed and tried to tell him jokingly, ‘It’s not like that!’
Well, one thing which Kohli probably cannot avoid jokingly now is that just before the Australia tour, he has to present his old era of prowess in front of the world again. He will not be able to score even a half-century in both the innings of the Chennai Test. Kohli is well aware of how his contemporaries Joe Root and Kane Williamson are showing a different consistency in terms of Test centuries. Kohli has played 30 Test matches since his inning of 136 runs against Bangladesh in November 2019. In which he has scored only 2 centuries. Certainly, these figures do not match with the personality of a player like Kohli. It can be expected that Kohli will definitely get a Test century during this period. The average (32.72) has come down much from his career average. Till a few years ago, keeping an average above 50 was just a formality. During his dominance, he even took his average to 60. Were successful in going.
However, Team India has such a batting order which was not troubled at all in Chennai despite the failure of not only Kohli but also captain Rohit Sharma. The reason for this was not only the centuries of Rishabh Pant and Shubman Gill but also the excellent batting of Ashwin and Jadeja as all-rounders. In the first innings in Chennai, opener Yashasvi Jaiswal also started well and scored a half-century but could not play a big innings. Perhaps that’s why when he was batting with Rohit Sharma during net practice, the captain was continuously talking to him. Sometimes he was seen giving advice, sometimes encouraging him and sometimes congratulating him on his good shots. Ever since Jaiswal started his Test career in West Indies last year, the Indian captain has been trying to mentor him in a special way.
Even when Jaiswal’s bat was creating a stir in the last home series against England, Rohit had refrained from praising him publicly and when the series ended in Dharamshala, he praised the young player. Perhaps Rohit is aware of the challenge of the Australia tour after a month and he knows how important it is for an opener like Jaiswal to be in top form to achieve success there. Well, Team India does not need to worry too much about changing its strategy to defeat Bangladesh once again. It is almost certain that instead of the third seamer, the third spinner in the form of Kuldeep Yadav will get a chance. Team India has won 17 consecutive Test series since 2013, winning every Test series at home. And the historic ground of Kanpur is waiting to witness their 18th series.
Tags: India vs Bangladesh, R ashwin, Rohit sharma, Virat Kohli
FIRST PUBLISHED : September 26, 2024, 9:59 PM IST