Moving ahead from the memories of the past, both sides gear up for the enervating four-match Border-Gavaskar Trophy series between India and Australia beginning 9 February in Nagpur.
The series will be India’s last chance to qualify for the World Test Championships Final to be held later this year. However, it is Australia whose head coach Andrew McDonald has some important pieces of advice for his troop. The Aussies had earlier chosen to opt out of the practice matches, considering them of little value to train all by themselves.
Australia’s spin struggle
Andrew McDonald who earlier replaced Justin Langer as Australia’s head coach, expressed the biggest challenge for his side would be to find individual techniques and methods to face the “slide spin” from the Indian tweakers in the early overs.
“I think the new ball is the one that creates more of that slide and when the batters do get done on the inside. The key to success there is to have a clear method and that will be individually based and depending on the conditions we’re confronted with, we’ll be trying to make sure the batters are clear, about their method” said Andrew McDonald.
The pitch plan
Both Steve Smith and McDonald believe that serving green tops for tour games and spinning tracks for actual games defeat the very purpose of playing practice matches. The head coach mentioned the variation each track will have to offer where the Test matches will be played and it will only boil down to the batters’ ability to judge the shots better.
With an experienced squad, most of whom have played in the sub continent before, the strategy the kangaroos are following is to create a blueprint while training in Bengaluru and repeat the process.
“Often, there’s no real connection between that practice game and the first Test match. We feel as though we can control the surfaces here, get a bit more control in Bangalore to replicate what we’re going to come up against and then we go into Nagpur fresh and hopefully it pays dividends at the back end.” told McDonald.
As for the visitors, the Pat Cummins-led side had last won the series back in 2014-15 . With a strong pace attack led by the skipper himself and Lyon in tow to take care of the spin department, the contest against the strong Indian batting lineup would be something to watch out for.