Topic: Test Cricket Prediction and Discussion Thread [self - mod] - page 856. (Read 153003 times)

This time England chose James Anderson in the playing XI and it turned out to be such a good decision. He picked up 3 wickets for 24 runs and now his test tally stands at 603 wickets. The other bowlers were disappointing. I would have liked Stuart Broad instead of Mark Wood, as I believe his style of bowling is more suitable to the conditions. Both the spinners failed to create any sort of impact (Jack Leach/Dom Bess).

Sri Lanka is playing in their turf and they need to perform better against the visiting team, Mathews is playing a long innings and if the rest of the team members are able to build a good partnership around him then they will be able to post a good total on the board. I am not familiar with the bowlers but if they are having quality spinners then they can trouble the England players as batting in the final day in Sri Lanka wont be easy.

If Kohli makes a mistake as captain in the next series or if they fail to win the next series then maybe Virat Kohli can lose his captaincy. Rahane has won the Test series against a team like Australia. He has proved his worth

I have not seen a captain that stood out in a series when the main players are injured and the team had to include the net bowlers to be a part of the team for the final Test and to come out on top is incredible. If India was trashed it was not a surprise as everyone expected as none of the players are in the playing eleven. But to take a team that was all out for 36 runs and make the necessary bowling changes with the resources Rahane had was outstanding and then to score a century and lead from the front is what India needed at that time.

One thing is certain, every match the performance of Kohli as a captain will be scrutinized and that might put too much pressure and that might even affect his batting, the biggest advantage i see in Kohli is that he is performing at his best as a captain and he always scores runs leading from the front but when the team is under pressure when bowling there is a lack of tactical decisions and i believe if Kohli was the captain the entire series India would have lost because of his aggressive approach that will put too much pressure on the young players but a clam Rahane was able to extract the best performance from each and every player.

Its look like now time for Sri Lanka to do better then first test as this is good ground for them and they can built very good total with the help of Mathews and Dickwella if these both stays for some more time then surely they are going to be in front as Galle is never been good for England going under runs of 350+ is also very bad for them but still its just first day we have to watch for some more time how they play after winning first test very good.

SL off to good start in second test against England and at the end of the day they are 229/4. Despite the bad start where they lost 2 wickets for just 7 wickets, they came back strongly with Matthews not out with century and Chandimal got out at 52. If they can manage to play majority day tomorrow, they would be 400+ which will be a good score and just to put some pressure on England in their innings if they can pick coupe of quick wickets.

It was supposed to happen Rahane was only a replacement for Kohli for the Australian series. Now sice Kohli is free he can join back the squad. I do not think performance from the up coming series will affect kohli. After all he has a lot of support from the team and the management.

OK.. most of us would have liked to see Ajinkya Rahane as the captain of the Indian squad for the series against England, but the BCCI have gone back to Virat Kohli. Their reasoning is perfectly understandable. At this point it will be too early to criticize this decision. Let's see how the series turns out for India. If Kohli's captaincy is not up to the mark, then I am sure that BCCI will reconsider their decision for the next series.

You know what I think. Captaincy isn't always about delivering results. A person from outside like us might feel that this captains isn't good but it's like saying your friend that his boss is bad when you have never worked under his boss. Some captains don't focus on short term winnings they seek to develop long term assets for the team. Dhoni in his initial part of career developed some great assets for the team. So did Saurav Ganguly. We sitting outside really have just one metric of judging captaincy which is the win percentage which isn't always that accurate. Even the out of the box decisions made by Dhoni would have looked idiotic if India would have lost in those occassions. so I think there is no point discussing who should be captain until you are part of dressing room.

In cricket, selectors give more priority to the player stats and individual performance as quality to captain a team but it is a completely different task in my opinion. One who can group every player into the same mindset in the dressing room and also in the ground should be the one to be considered.Anyway, none of the proposed things are going to happen, Rahane proved that he can so in the future if he got chances he may do it again.

To tell you the fact, i never considered Kohli as a tactical captain, he has the aggression but that alone will not win you matches, you need to be a tactical captain to win matches in difficult situation. MSD was a tactical captain in the shorter format but he applied the same in Test and so he was not that successful in the later part of his captaincy. Kohli is leading RCB and even if they have a strong team i have never seen the team performing to their strength.

This is the first time i am seeing Rahane captaining a side and to win a series in Australia with a completely young team says a lot about his captaining skills and that too after getting humiliated and getting bowled out for just 36 runs with Kohli as the captain in the first match and to recover and Rahane leading from the front and scoring that century and then winning the series is outstanding.

Rahane was informed even before the 4th test that he would be the captain only on a temporary basis. I agree that his captaincy was exceptional, but then Virat Kohli would simply refuse to depart with his position as the captain of the squad. And it will be wrong to make Rahane the permanent captain after just one series, although I would favor giving him more chances.

I agree with you. This will go down as the best ever test series win for an Indian team and every player contributed to the series win. This series win can also help benefit some of the younger players and make them into great players as they came up against one of the best bowling attacks in the world and were playing away from home so it will be interesting to see how some of these younger players careers progress after this series.

I did not expect this turn around from India and you need to give all the credits to Ajinkya Rahane for taking a second string of players and motivating them and then able to extract the best performance from all the news players, in my opinion Ajinkya Rahane should be the captain as he proved his mettle as a captain but i am not expecting Kohli to hand over the captaincy but he will be under scrutiny in all of the upcoming series and if they under perform as a team he will be replaced.

The highlight of the entire series is that how a young team could conquer a team that is dominant in their home turf and the most impressive part is that only two players played the entire series, Pujara and Rahane, rest of the players were included in the team every match due to injury and they still performed even though they are making their debut which is incredible. Some of the players might not get the chance if the established players return in the team but every player contributed even though they were making their debut and that is the main difference.

But this is 11 men sportsen game so not everyone is going to get their chances even if they are deserved to be one. And it is not good idea to swap players for every series because need a permanent team then only their mindset will sync together and can perform much better by understanding the pros and cons of their fellow team player.

I think ODI and T20 are also equally entertaining. They might no feel that great because of the legacy test cricket carry but they are entertaining in their own way. ODI is still a bit less entertaining these days because it's sort of stuck in between a flux of Test cricket and T20 cricket. But T20 cricket has its own flavor. People love t20 because every ball in t20 is a contest between the batsmen and bowler from which the batsmen cannot back out. But yes bilateral series of T20 cricket doesn't make much sense. It would become much more interesting if played in a tri-series or quad-series format.

Coming to other sports organizations. I have been associated with a couple of associations of state levels in Lawn Tennis and Chess. They too have huge dreams and aspirations for the development of their sport. But everything comes down to viewership. How often you see switching on a channel to see Lawn Tennis. No viewership makes their business a charitable business and they end up at the mercy of the ministry to give them the money they need and then we all know how slow these machineries are.

Sadly that's a reality for right and wrong reasons. But they could try this with the India A vs Rest of India (Ranji team), after that may be 1 game in between India vs India A. Plus BCCI should get rid of Billateral series for T-20/ODI and focus more on Trilateral and Quadrilateral series to resolve schedule problems.

Hanuma Vihari is considered run machine in domestic cricket, he average like 55ish there and doesn't have any sort of backing,he was making shitload amount of runs in almost every domestic season along with Mayank Aggarwal. Last season they played, both were averaging like 90+ and 100+ respectively that's why they went to Australia. About Vihari's international stats, i think you are ignoring the fact that he batted in tough conditions so far. He scored valuable 50s in England/NZ and asked to open inning in Australia when KL/Murali Vijay failed and he's not opener, his only job was to face the new ball against Starc-Cummins-Hazelwood. He did remarkable job there.

Karun Nair was unlucky and lucky at the same time. Unlucky because he deserved to play few more games but you can't deny the fact that competition is tough. And lucky because he debuted in India, not many players enjoy this feat (Vihari,Mayank etc) and got like 6 back to back games but he only scored only 1 big triple ton.

We are not going to see Ishan Kishan in Whites anytime soon (may be never). He needs to perform in Ranji first. In Ranji if your average is below 40 then no one is going to notice you. Shreyas Iyer is excellent and i think he will come in the Test squad soon.

Only 12 matches are not enough to find the real ability of a player in the test cricket and we are talking about the wall so the potential to play longer innings is much indeed than scoring runs which he proved. His first-class test average is above 40 for 80+ matches so for sure he is one of the batsmen born to become a test cricketer like Pujara.

Since when did Indians start taking decision based on who is the right man for the job or who performed well..LOL..That goes against our culture. We have things like experience, prestige and "raula" to take care of. So right now, Kohli's and Shastri's "Raula" is too much to lead to any such change.
No offense to Kohli as he is the best batsman out there but Shastri has a parasitic relationship with him. He takes care of Kohli's ego and Kohli returns the favor. That dynamic is pretty much visible between the two. So performance or no performance, Rahane will be back where he belongs until Team India performs badly, which is quite difficult considering the talented bunch of individuals there are.