Team India veteran Dinesh Karthik reflected on why the national can’t replicate England’s Bazball brand of Test cricket at present.
England’s refreshing positive brand in Test cricket ever since Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, having taken over as the captain and coach respectively earlier this year, has been fetching them strong results since. The side have won eight of the nine Tests in the period, which includes the first two games of the ongoing three-match series in Pakistan.
KL Rahul, who is captaining India in the ongoing first of two Tests in Bangladesh, had said that India would play aggressive cricket with a spot in the World Test Championship final up for grabs.
“There is a Test championship (final) qualification so we will also have to be aggressive. We know where we stand and what we need to do to qualify for the final,”
India, though, progressed at a run-rate of 3 in their first-innings effort of 404 all-out on a challenging surface in Chattogram, with Cheteshwar Pujara (90 off 203) and Shreyas Iyer (86 off 192) being the major contributors, before Ravichandran Ashwin (58 off 113) and Kuldeep Yadav (40 off 114) adding a valuable 92-run stand for the eighth wicket.
The methodology worked fine for India, as they had Bangladesh reduced to 133/8 by stumps on Day 2. While speaking to Cricbuzz, Karthik explained why India can’t replicate the Bazball style of play in Test cricket at present.
“For starters, India cannot play the Bazball kind of cricket because right now, it’s not a part of our DNA to do something like that For KL Rahul to come out and say that they will play aggressive cricket basically means that they want to make a match out of it and get a result, knowing that the WTC final is around the corner and these two games become critical.
They want to press the accelerator and push the scoring rate. They couldn’t do it today because the wicket is slow, and you have to bring a different tempo altogether and that will require a few players who bat that way.”
