Ahead of the World Test Championship Final against Australia at The Oval, India skipper Rohit Sharma said his team is ready to grind it out in the marquee clash against challenging batting conditions and dukes ball.
“England, in general, is pretty challenging conditions for the batters, but as long as you are prepared to have a good grind, you know, you can have some success as a batter. One thing I realised batting (in 2021) was you are never in actually, because the weather keeps changing a lot.”
“So you got to keep concentrating for longer periods of time and that is the challenge of this format. You know you’ll get that message, or you can get that intuition when it is your time to take the bowler on, and that is when you should be ready for it and more importantly you need to be there,” said Rohit at a pre-game live event organised by ICC.
On the tour to England in 2021 (spilling into 2022), Rohit top-scored for India in the four Tests, hitting a match-winning 127 in the second innings at The Oval in the fourth match and knows a thing or two about batting at the iconic venue.
“As we know that this is probably one of the best batting wickets as well. You get value for your shots, the square boundaries are quite quick. So it’s just about giving yourself the best chance of having success, which is to concentrate for longer periods of time.”
“I’ve watched a lot of batters opening the batting here in these conditions and you know a lot of the guys who’ve had success I’ve seen them how they’ve gone about you know scoring those runs obviously I’m not gonna try and emulate them because they all have different styles and I have a different style, but it’s nice to know the pattern of scoring runs here,” he added.
India’s cricketers barring Cheteshwar Pujara have little time in hand to make the switch from playing against the white Kookaburra ball to the red Dukes ball. Rohit feels rather than the skill aspect, one’s got to focus on the mental switch too.
“If you’re going to play, this is something that you have to come up with mentally. You got to be adaptable, adjust whatever little tweak you need to do in your technique. But more than that, I think it’s just talking to yourself and getting mentally ready.”
“Lot of the other guys in the squad haven’t done that because we’ve got a lot of new faces in the squad as well. For me, it’s just been really talking to myself, getting mentally ready, because that is something that a lot of us have been doing for many years.”
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