India ready for grind

Tribune News Service

new delhi, june 22

Virat Kohli was so desperate to succeed on India’s Test tour of England that he signed up to play for a month for Surrey in county cricket. But an injury he picked up in the IPL forced him to skip the county stint.

“Actually, I am ready to get back to the field, which is a very rare thing when you play so much cricket,” said the India captain on the eve of the team’s departure for a long limited-overs and Test tour of the United Kingdom.

He’s no more the fidgety young batsman who failed to make an impact during India’s tour of England in 2014. Kohli, who was finding his feet in Test cricket then, returned with an abysmal average of 13.40 in the five-Test series, with a highest score of 39.

Four years later, he returns to the same shores as a more assured batsman, a leader, perhaps the best batsman in business right now. As the captain of the No. 1 Test nation, Kohli wanted to lead from the front, thus the Surry sign-up. But a neck injury put paid to all the plans. He today said that was a blessing in disguise.

Blessing in disguise

“In hindsight, what has happened was the best thing for me...” he said on the eve of the team’s departure for the UK. “Yes, I wanted to go and experience the conditions. There’s a big gap of four years and you sort of forget how the conditions were when you played the last time.”

“So I wanted the more difficult phase of those conditions. Now we are going to enter the heat wave. I wanted the damp and the wet conditions, which Puji (Cheteshwar Pujara) played in, Ishant (Sharma) played in...” he added. “But in hindsight, when I look at it now, if I was 90 per cent fit in my body and used to the conditions compared to feeling 110 per cent now and going in fresh, I would much rather be in this position. I need to be looking forward to it rather than thinking ‘Oh, I have been in that place for four months now’. And you don’t want that feeling because the Test series is in the latter half.”

Healed, ready to go

Asked about the neck injury that derailed his county plans, the captain said: “I am hundred percent ready to go. The neck is fine now. I have had six to seven sessions in Mumbai. I have had good practice and I am absolutely ready to go. I went through a fitness test as well so the body is feeling fine. Actually I am very excited and ready to get back to the field which is a very rare thing when you play so much cricket and I think these sort of break really help, mentally they make you fresh and make you excited to go back onto the pitch again.”

Kohli said that India’s win in the Johannesburg Test earlier this year gave them the belief that they could compete. “Then people really understood how well we played in that series,” he said. 

Scrap two new-ball rule to revive reverse swing: SRT

NEW DELHI: Batting great Sachin Tendulkar says cricket should revisit the rule of using two new balls in One-day games in order to revive the moribund art of reverse swing in the format. “Having two new balls in One-day cricket is a perfect recipe for disaster as each ball is not given the time to get old enough to reverse,” Tendulkar tweeted on Friday. “We haven’t seen reverse swing, an integral part of the death overs for a long time.” England’s batsmen clobbered 21 sixes and 41 fours against Australia as they became the first team to reach 450 in One-day cricket at Nottingham, prompting former captain Mike Atherton to question the two-ball rule. — Reuters