India tour of England 2018 News

On this day in 2018, Virat Kohli scored a majestic Test ton in Birmingham.

Making a comeback after injury, Jadeja bagged the man of the match awards in Nagpur and Delhi Tests against Australia, respectively.

On this day, four years ago, Alastair Cook finished his Test career with a fitting hundred against India at the Oval.

The Indian cricket team has opted to play two warm-up games against an India -A side instead of the earlier norm of playing practice games against county teams in the time leading up to the Test series against India. The warm-up games will be played on the county grounds of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire as Virat Kohli-led senior team will challenge an A side that will be picked later on. These two warm-up games will be four-day fixtures and the first one will commence on July 21 at Wantage Road while the final warm-up game has been scheduled to take place from July 28. The series against England will begin at Trent Bridge, Nottingham on August 04. The tickets for these warm-up games will be open for sale in March later this year. The Indian team has shown apprehensions in the past about the quality of pitches and opposition they get in warm-up games and they have for a long time contemplated the option of skipping these practice games before the actual series as they had a belief that these games do not give too much value to their efforts of acclimatising with the pitches and conditions in the country. India on the last tour in 2018 cut short a four-day fixture against Essex due to be played at Chelmsford to a three-day affair and also relegated the status of the game from a first-class fixture to practice game and instead decided to use the one extra day to practice before the first Test in Edgbaston.

One of the biggest problems of with Indian cricket community is its inability to distinguish between formats. This is most evident in how performances in Indian Premier League (IPL) are often considered sound basis to rate a player's abilities in the longer format. Also, not looking at different formats separately leads to incorrect assumptions about form. One player who is constantly described as playing for his career or under pressure to prove himself again is Ajinkya Rahane. Anyone who only looks at his Test performances would be stunned to see how unfairly he is tagged as 'out of form' even in the longest format of the game. So much has been said and written about the 'form' of Rahane coming into this series. That is the height of absurdity. If one looks at the performances of Rahane in Test cricket, he would know that the Mumbai batsman has been among the most consistent in the Indian team and is actually a cornerstone of the team's batting. But this is where the short-sightedness of Indian fans and critics comes into play. Just because he didn't have a good IPL, Rahane was dubbed as being 'out of form.' Now, what in the world does a T20 league have to do with Test cricket. If IPL performances be the parameter for judging a player's form in Tests, Indian should drop Pujara since he doesn't even get into an IPL XI. Now, let's look at Rahane's performances in the last few years. Yes, he didn't get runs in the two Tests against New Zealand, India's last Test series. But guess what, neither did Virat Kohli. In fact, in the four innings that India played in that series, the highest score by an Indian was 58 - by Mayank Agarwal in the second innings of the first Test. In the first innings of that match, Rahane was the top scorer for India with 46. Now let's keep going backwards. Before that series, India played Bangladesh at home in two Tests. India had just two innings to bat in the two matches. Rahane scored 86 and 51 in his two innings. Before that, India played South Africa in three Tests at home. Rahane scored 215 runs in that series with an average of over 72, including one century and one half-century. Before that, in West Indies, Rahane scored 271 runs at an average of 102 with one hundred and two fifties, in the two-match series. Now, even before the series in West Indies, Rahane was deemed to be 'under pressure.' Why was that? Let's look at his performances in Test matches before that tour. In India's famous series win in Australia, Rahane wasn't among the top scorers. Still, he scored half-centuries in the first two Tests - He didn't get runs in the remaining two matches, which included just three innings, but is that enough to question his place in the team. Prior to the tour of Australia, Rahane had scored 87 in the first innings of the only Test India won in England, forming a partnership with Virat Kohli that set up India's victory. Prior to that, in South Africa, Ravi Shastri and Virat Kohli chose Rohit Sharma ahead of Rahane for the first two Tests because Rohit has more 'intent' - the word that Shastri-Kohli duo are obsessed with. Rohit failed in both those matches and then, Rahane played in the third Test, played on a most dangerous seamer-friendly pitch. In India's vital second-innings, he top scored with 48, helping India gain a big win. A player with such a record ought to be backed even when he's had a lean series, rather than judged to be 'playing for his place.' More importantly, Rahane's form since India's tour of West Indies has been extremely good. Yet, because he didn't do well in a T20 league, he was judged to be 'under pressure.' Such nonsense must cease immediately.

Australia and England are two very different countries when it comes to the challenges they present to the batsmen. In UK, the challenge comes from the generous swing bowlers get while Down Under, it's the bounce which tests out a batsman's technique. In 2014, Virat Kohli endured the most miserable time of his career when he went through five Test matches in England without gettting even one half-century. But later that year, in Australia, he plundered over 500 runs in a four-match Test series with four centuries. However, Kohli's performances against Australia in the last two series have been well under-par by his own lofty standards. In the 2017 home series against the Aussies, the Indian captain didn't get even as far as 20 in the five innings he played. In the 2018/19 series in Australia, he scored arguably the best hundred of his career at Perth but otherwise, was overshadowed by Cheteshwar Pujara. It did seem that Australian bowlers had a better plan against Kohli than other bowlers. This plan got somewhat revealed in the first ODI of the series that preceded the Test contest on this tour. The plan was simple - bowl the fifth-stump line. This is the one area where Kohli's vulnerability was known years ago and was exploited by many. In fact, it was this line that caused his downfall in the 2018 England tour. However this line proved innocuous when the English bowlers were denied the help from swing-friendly conditions. Kohli's mountain of runs against the same team at home in the 2016 home sereis was testament to that. So, why did Australia succeed with the same strategy? This was because of a slight adjustment by the Australians to this strategy. In England, the ball swings, hence bowlers in that country natuarally bowl a fuller length. This length proves disasterous in Indian conditions, as Jimmy Anderson and his colleagues found out in India. Australian bowlers, on the other hand, having been brought up on hard pitches, bowl shorter, what is called back-of-a-length. The Aussie bowlers realized that pitching the ball up, even on a fifth-stump line would allow Kohli to use his driving prowess to great effect. So, they combined this line with a shorter length, to take away Kohli's drives and make him look for more ambitious shots. It worked in the first ODI of the three-match series last month. Kohli would have understood that this would be the mode of attack that Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins would employ in the only Test of the series he will play. To counter that, Kohli went back to the strategy that allowed him to conquer what many regarded as his final frontier - England. In 2018, before the 5-match Test series in England, all the hype was about the Anderson vs Kohli contest. The big question that everyone asked was: can Kohli overcome Anderson's skills? The Indian batting maestro did that with aplomb. He scored more than 500 runs and avoided, if narrowly, getting out to Anderson even once. When asked how he turned the tables on England after that ghastly tour of 2014, he said it needed getting over his ego. On field, it meant being uncharacteristically patient and leaving deliveries on the dreaded fifth-stump line alone all day. This made him successful, though, it also meant that he didn't dominate Anderson but showed him great respect. Now, this wouldn't have been easy for the fiery and often intemperate Indian captain. He must have needed to dig really deep to get over the urge of trying to go after Anderson and prove his superiority. But by ignoring the short-term but dangerous pleasure of hitting boundaries against his English adversary, he achieved the ultimate goal of scoring big runs in England. On day 1 of the first Test against Australia at Adelaide, Kohli used the same method to achieve success, though it was cut short by a run-out. For a batsmen whose breathtaking strokeplay has earned millions of admirers around the world, Kohli showed incredible restraint and used the leave outside the off-stump to great effect. Kohli's 74 took an unusually long 180 balls. This was a great example of why Test cricket is the greatest sport in the world and way better than the ersatz spectacle of T20 cricket. It doesn't just depend on your skill but your personality as a whole. To succeed in Test cricket, for a decent period of time, one needs to use the strength of his character, not just skill and talent. The evolution of Kohli from an intemperate hothead to a victor over his ego is the best example of the greatness of this format and this sport. It's also a testament to the grit and determination that the 32-year old genius has shown in his cricketing journey.