Virat will take Indian cricket to heights we've never seen before: Ravichandran Ashwin

India off-spinning ace Ravichandran Ashwin has joined the list of people who admire Virat Kohli and his batting heroics. Ashwin feels that Kohli has reached the stage where he has mastered the art of chasing targets and has admitted but Indian Test skipper is a role-model for him.

“It is mind-boggling the kind of chases he completes for India, it is just amazing. I was watching the game with a few friends and it is just amazing how he paces these chases,” Ashwin told India Today. “When Ross Taylor put his catch down and Kohli went on to score a fifty, it was basically curtains. It (target) was well within his reach, he never let the required run rate creep past 6.5; he kept that also within reach. The kind of boundaries he hits and his running between the wickets is amazing.”

“There are certain grounds in India where he has certainly mastered the angles, he knows where he can get his twos and when he can accelerate. For example, in the game against Australia in the World T20, somebody who can chase that game down, he literally hunted that target alone. I think he is one of those guys who will drive Indian cricket really forward and up and to heights we have never seen before, ” he said.

Kohli has been in sensational form this year and has amassed runs across all three formats. He says that there is no adjective to define his class as a batsman. Ashwin also thinks that Kohli’ arrogance and aggression is quite normal in this generation and it has in fact changed the way cricket is played in India.

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“There is not one adjective that I put down for Virat. If at I can describe him it would be ‘role-model’. I kind of started playing cricket with him and he was this excited kid who burst onto the scene, was very aggressive, he wore his emotions on his heart while he played cricket.

“He was one of those cricketers people could easily pull down saying that he is very aggressive or arrogant, but that is the next generation isn’t it. He has transformed the way cricket needs to be viewed in the country.”

“Once upon a time we used to say Michael Bevan is great at chasing but times have changed, this is a different era and people are hunting down different kinds of scores, you don’t know where it will go, one day we might be chasing 400 on a regular basis. Virat’s performance training and his attention to detail on smaller things, how he can convert ones to twos, how he can sustain after the 40th over.

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“How often do you see batsmen at no.3 or openers thinking about 40th over and beyond but he does that. If you see yesterday he took the game to 47th over and clubbed Boult to finish the game in one over. He knows exactly what he wants to do,” he said.