The bench strength is coming up beautifully, says Virat Kohli
Virat Kohli has heaped praise on his bench players who took their chances brilliantly as every combination worked well in their recently concluded tour of Sri Lanka. In the 9-0 clean sweep across all the three formats, India have achieved a rare record that is unlikely to be broken anytime soon.
India completely dominated Sri Lanka in their entire tour winning the three-game Test series 3-0 and the five-match ODI series 5-0, leaving the coaching staff sufficient time to try out new combinations with bench players in the only T20I. With the likes of Manish Pandey and Shardul Thakur breaking into the ODI team early, Sunday’s T20 game saw India handing out KL Rahul the opening slot alongside Rohit Sharma. Spinners like Kuldeep Yadav and Axar Patel also got chances to ply their trade, which was a risk in a one-off game.
However, India’s squad seems to have every base covered with nothing going wrong for them at the moment. And Kohli has given credits to the strong bench strength. “The bench strength is coming up beautifully. We tried a few things, the results are amazing to see.”
Earlier, Kohli had stressed how India will have 37 ODI games before the 2019 World Cup to try out different combinations before getting the perfect one for the mega event in England. And given the way things are going on for India, the core bunch of 20-25 people would expect to get enough opportunities to prove their mettle in the next one year.
The 28-year-old skipper was declared man of the match after yet another blistering innings of 82 runs off 54 balls, which was significant to India’s successful run chase of 171 runs. Apart from this, Kohli got one century in the first Test before two consecutive tons followed in the 3 and 4 ODIs, placing him as the joint-second highest ODI centurion of all time with Ricky Ponting.
“Personally, I look to back my strengths and play cricketing shots. I’ve tried to