The one-off Test match against Bangladesh, scheduled to begin Wednesday, will be Virat Kohli’s first as full-time Test captain and the excited star batsman says he is ready to roll out his vision for Indian cricket.
“It is pretty special. I never thought at 26 I will be captain of the Indian Test side. My only dream as a child was to play Test cricket for India. Over the years I have matured in my mind. The people around me in BCCI and my teammates thought that I was the right guy for the job. I am pretty grateful for that,” Kohli said in the pre-match press conference.
“I have some vision in my mind which I have discussed with the team. We are all on the same page. It is pretty exciting for me to start as full-time Test captain and hopefully it is a positive start,” he added.
Talking about the playing eleven for the match, Kohli gave enough of a hint that he could go in with five bowlers and six batsmen.
“I certainly believe in giving the team a chance to pick up 20 wickets. I am a big fan of playing five bowlers in a 6-5 combination. You only need two to three batsmen to click to get a score of 500,” he said.
The Indian team arrived in Dhaka on Monday and, mere hours later, they were seen practising at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium.
Asked whether the team would get enough preparation time for the five-day affair, Kohli said: “We only have one Test match so we can afford to push ourselves to the limit. Had it been a three- or four-Test series so there would be need to [conserve] our energy.
"Right now the priority is to get into game intensity. We are training hard so that guys get into the mindset of the game. You need to build that momentum in practice and [the players] need to be ready to deliver from ball one. Today's practice session is going to be a light one but we have pushed ourselves in the last few days,” he said.
He asserted his team did not need to pay much attention to how the pitch would play out.
“Wickets in Bangladesh are similar everywhere. There is no change of soil. Most of the guys have played here last year. We will pretty much know the wicket will play. You don’t really need to practice again and again in places where you have played a lot of cricket. Bangladesh is a place where we have played a lot of cricket. It is not going to make that much of a difference in terms of preparations,” added Kohli.
