Have a lot of work to do despite decent progress: Kohli, Shastri echo similar views
Mumbai: India cricket captain Virat Kohli and coach Ravi Shastri’s minds are clear in terms of where the team is heading, and the duo reflected upon their tour to England this summer and what lies in store in Australia.
With the team departing to Australia on Friday, the duo believed that the team has made decent progress since the South Africa tour earlier this year.
“I see a lot of progress across all formats. And I say that inspite of the scoreline in England, when you look at actual performances across all three formats in conditions on foreign tours, I am more than happy. It is still a learning process. If we learn from the mistakes we made in South Africa and in England, I think it will stand as a good stead in Australia,” said Ravi Shastri during the pre-departure press conference here on Thursday.
Kohli echoed similar views on this.
“I believe we have made decent progress. But still, there is a lot of scope for improvement. We understand as a group what we need to work on. It is upto the individual to take ownership of that responsibility and the things that are laid out as expectations from a team culture point of view,” he said.
The 30-year-old Kohli also analysed on what went wrong on the England tour.
“There are lot of things that we sat down and worked upon on what went wrong after the England tour.
“To be honest, we all felt that there was not much that went wrong, but whatever was not right was very extreme also. We played well but mistakes were also extreme. That is why we lost that many number of games rather than winning those moments and winning the games,” continued the skipper.
We have to learn from victories also: Kohli
“It is about learning from victories as well. It is not only about enjoying our victories and forgetting them. We need to learn from what we did right in a match, and that is consistency. In order to be consistent as a team, each individual has to sit down and remember what they did,” continued the Delhi cricketer.
Kohli went onto say that England’s lower-order batting was better than India’s and that had made the difference in the UK.
“In England, their lower order contribution was much more than ours. So lower order contribution is important and that was the difference in the series. That is where we want our guys to be fearless,” added Kohli.
Kohli and co will kick off the full-fledged tour with the first of three T20Is against Australia starting on November 21. The T20Is will be followed by four Tests and three ODIs as the teams continue preparation for next year’s ICC World Cup in England.
