India vs Australia | Virat Kohli all praise for “outstanding” Bumrah-Bhuvneshwar new-ball pairing

India vs Australia | Virat Kohli all praise for “outstanding” Bumrah-Bhuvneshwar new-ball pairing

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BCCI

Virat Kohli has termed the duo of Jasprit Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar Kumar as excellent new-ball pair and credited their “thinking” ability as the reason for their success. Kohli has also made it clear that the team is there to win the series and doesn’t want to be satisfied with “one-odd" wins.

While India have never been touted as a great place for world-class pace bowlers, a closer look reveals that the country have always had one very good bowler with a high-ability partner. Kapil Dev had Manoj Prabhakar, Javagal Srinath had Venkatesh Prasad, and Zaheer Khan had Ajit Agarkar and later Irfan Pathan to give them company and built pressure. While they combined well to do great things for the team, very rarely have India fielded two world-class seamers simultaneously until Bumrah joined forces with Bhuvneshwar. With the Australia series starting tomorrow, India will be at the pole position thanks to the duo’s presence and understandably, Kohli is excited about that.

“Both of them (Bhuvneshwar and Bumrah) have been outstanding. The reason they’re so good is that they are thinking bowlers. They understand the situation and get a gut feel of what a batsman is looking to do before they go in to bowl. The ability to predict what’s going to happen on each ball is what keeps them a step ahead of the batsmen most of the time,” Kohli said in the pre-match press conference in Brisbane, reported Scroll.in.

“Sometimes they will get dominated like everyone does, but I think 85%-90% of the time they are spot on and that’s because they are always looking at how the game is going and how the batsmen are batting, what areas they’re hitting at, and what are the balls they need to execute in difficult situations.”

Earlier in the day, Cricket Australia released an official statement as a response to the plea by Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA) and decided not to make any changes to the sanctions handed down to the three players - Steve Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft. This means the trio will not be a part of the India series, leaving Australia a weaker side. On being asked about the same, the 30-year-old decided not to speak much.

“I honestly don’t know what exactly happened before those decisions were taken. Obviously everyone saw what happened [in the match] but unless I know the details it’s not my place to comment on. The decision is being made by someone and that’s being going on on the sidelines. It’s not my place to give an opinion on,” Kohli said.

After making early and sometimes, borderline arrogant statements ahead of the South Africa and England tour earlier this year, India took a cautious route ahead of this series and neither oRavi Shastri nor Kohli made any pompous remarks. However, in no uncertain terms, Kohli stated that the team is here to win the series and doesn’t want one-odd wins in every series.

“We definitely are not thinking that this is the last opportunity for us to win in Australia and that we might not come here again. I don’t think that’s the right kind of mindset to have. Whatever series we play, our aim is to win that series. We don’t want to be a team that wins one-odd Test match here and there [in an away series].

“We have figured out our mistakes in England. The quality of cricket was very high but our mistakes were as radical and that’s why we lost the games. We won the game where we committed lesser mistakes. We were at par with the other team throughout [in that game]. I think we have the ability to compete with the other team at par. In Test cricket, whichever team makes lesser mistakes wins the game. We are focussing on cutting down our mistakes and if a situation goes bad for us, how to plug that situation as soon as possible and find an outcome how to come out of that situation so we can stabilise our position.

“We have identified those areas and obviously Australia is always a big tour for any Indian side. We played good cricket last time but were not able to win games. This time around we definitely want to change that. We definitely believe we have the quality to do so but it will boil down to how we think in each moment in every game we play on this tour,” the Indian skipper said.

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