Sunil Gavaskar feels India didn't play adequate practice matches in England

India recently played the first Test against England at Edgbaston in Birmingham and lost the match by a slender margin of 31 runs. Virat Kohli played a couple of herculean knocks, yet his team couldn’t cross the finishing line in the contest, which turned out to be a humdinger. The bowlers including the likes of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ishant Sharma put their hands up to get a stranglehold on the English batsmen.

However in the batting department, apart from Virat, no other batsmen could survive the heat. The match eventually came to a close in a tad more than three days. Prior to the series, India played a three-day practice match against Essex at County Ground in Chelmsford. However, Sunil Gavaskar, the former Indian batsman, believes that the visiting team didn’t play adequate warm-up matches in order to get themselves prepared.

So clearly you needed to have more practice

“Definitely not. We are talking about the Indian team being there and everybody is talking about the Indian team being there. But, they were playing with the white ball and the white ball doesn’t swing at all. It hardly swings for half-a-dozen overs or so but the red-ball keeps swinging.

We saw in this Test match that even in the 40th over, 50th over, the ball was moving around in the air as well as off the surface,” Gavaskar was quoted as saying by India Today in an exclusive interview.

“So clearly you needed to have more practice. You can have as much as simulated practice with the throw downs etc but it is never the same as in a match. Because in throw downs, you can get out and still face the next ball, the bowler can bowl a no-ball but he still gets a wicket but in a match it is a completely different scenario. So, I thought that they should have played a little bit more,” he added.

Earlier this year, India didn’t play a practice match in South Africa citing the reason that honing their skills in the nets will be more beneficial. However, they drooped in the first couple of Tests to lose the series. Albeit they won in Johannesburg, the win was inconsequential as far as the series was concerned. Meanwhile, Virat Kohli and his men would be hoping to make a comeback in the second Test at Lord’s.

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