New Delhi: India taking on England in the five-match Test series is one of the most anticipated series of the year not only because of the quality of players involved but also “Bazball” cricket England has been playing under skipper Ben Stokes and head coach Brendon McCullum.
There have been questions surrounding the England side if they can execute the same style of cricket on turning pitches in India, and the follow-up to that interesting battle is, if they do succeed, how India will respond to it. Former Indian player Sunil Gavaskar said, “We have Viratball to counter Bazball.”
“The way he’s (Virat Kohli) been batting, his movement looks good,” Gavaskar told Star Sports. Though, Kohli did not make many runs in South Africa with respect to his standards on spicy pitches where there was seam moment and invariable bounce. But he looked a class apart from the other batters. The Indian talisman looked like his older self when he churned to massive runs for fun.
Kohli also has the amazing ability to score big when he gets a start. “Yeah, conversion means having more hundreds than fifties. With Kohli, he has a similar amount of hundreds and fifties (Kohli has 29 centuries and 30 half-centuries), which means he has a good conversion rate,” Gavaskar said.
“England have adopted a new approach in Test cricket in the last 1-2 years. It’s an aggressive approach where batters look to attack. They just want to play attacking cricket no matter the situation. It’ll be interesting to see if this approach works against the spinners of India,” Gavaskar further added.
England will start their series in Hyderabad, followed by games in Vishakhapatnam, Rajkot, and Ranchi, and play the final Test in Dharamsala.
England last won a Test series in India in 2012. Since then, they have been hammered. In the recent tour in 2021, they started positively with a win in the first Test in Chennai; however, they lost the next three. With Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum at the helm, who have yet to lose a test series, the England team hopes to get better results this time.
Agencies

KR Desk