Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], March 10 (ANI): India batting coach Vikram Rathour has said that by the time the five-match T20I series against England comes to an end, the Virat Kohli-led side should know what team they are going to play in the T20 World Cup later this year.
India and England will be locking horns in a T20I series, beginning Friday. All five T20Is will be played at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad.
The T20 World Cup is set to be played in October-November this year in India.
“The T20 World Cup is in India, so I just want the batting unit to get settled basically. By the time we finish this series, we should know, ‘this is the team which is going to play the World Cup’. So hopefully that will happen in this series. I am already sure that there wouldn’t be too many changes anyway, because we are a pretty settled unit at the moment. But in case somebody loses form or somebody gets injured, as a batting unit you just want to get settled now,” ESPNcricinfo quoted Rathour as saying.
When asked whether India should look to play in the same attacking manner as England, Rathour said: “You are looking to win a game. If you are chasing, strike rate doesn’t mean anything actually. You are looking to finish a game and chase a target – whether you do it in 10 overs or 20 overs, you are looking to win the game. Batting first, at times, yeah. If the conditions are good you need to be looking to put a par score on board.”
“As far as our T20 (batting) is concerned we have been doing that pretty consistently. So I’m not really, really concerned; I mean as far as we are winning games and we are putting par scores and chasing targets, I’m okay with whatever strike rates they are going at,” he added.
The upcoming five-match T20I series against England will help India get perfect practice before the T20 World Cup which is slated to be played in October-November this year in India.
Earlier, the Kohli-led side won the four-match Test series against England 3-1 to progress to the final of the World Test Championship.
WTC final will be played between India and New Zealand from June 18-22 at the Ageas Bowl, Southampton.
India’s T20I squad: Virat Kohli (captain), Rohit Sharma (vc), KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Shreyas Iyer, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant (wk), Ishan Kishan (wk), Yuzvendra Chahal, Varun Chakravarthy, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Rahul Tewatia, T Natarajan, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Deepak Chahar, Navdeep Saini, Shardul Thakur. (ANI)