Shastri wants India to aim for a positive start in Australia
Shastri believes India must target a fast start to the series in Perth to keep their World Test Championship hopes alive.
The date was February 21, 1981 when current India head coach Ravi Shastri played his maiden international match. Coincidentally, the venue, the opponents and the date will be same for the former all-rounder when his boys will be taking on New Zealand in the first Test of the two-match series at Basin Reserve.
Walking down the memory lane, Shastri recalled the feeling he had while playing his maiden game for India that too on foreign soil. In the match, Shastri returned figures of 3 for 54 and 3 for 9 in the first and second innings, respectively.
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“I think I was nervous, like anyone playing his first game. But I bowled tidily and I got the wicket of Jeremy Coney, which gave me confidence. Conditions were totally different when compared to wherever I have played because there were circling winds and it was a very, very cold day,” said Shastri on the eve of the opening Test in Wellington as quoted by IANS.
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“When I first walked out of the dressing room, I saw Hadlee, I saw (Lance) Cairns, I saw John Wright, Jeremy Coney whom we just listened to on the radio. Even in my own team, there were a lot of them who I hadn’t met. Gundappa (Vishwanath) was my childhood hero. It was great to play in a series with him. Sunny, of course, was captaining the side. There was Kapil there and a lot of these players, I met for the 1st time. When I took the field, I had not even met half of them,” he added.
Meanwhile, Shastri thanked the current Indian team and praised them by calling them “as good as any team that has played the game.”
“Thanks to you guys, I am with a great team, I call it a great team. I have watched cricket in those 39 years. When you look back, I would rate this team as good as any team that has played the game. When you look back, across all formats, the way they have travelled in the last two years not just white-ball cricket but red-ball cricket. It’s a testimony to the fact that this is a terrific Indian team,” said Shastri.
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