The Indian team will look to make it 9 Test series wins in a row when they take on Sri Lanka in the third and final Test match at the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi.
The home team holds a 1-0 lead in the series having won the second Test match in Nagpur, and a win or a draw in Delhi will result in that ninth consecutive series win.
Kotla – Team India’s Impregnable Fortress
Getting the better of Team India at the Feroz Shah Kotla is a daunting task, for the team has made the venue a fortress. The last time a visiting team won a Test match in Delhi was in November 1987 when Vivian Richards led the West Indies to a 5-wicket win with a fourth innings hundred.
Since then, no visiting team has met with success at the Feroz Shah Kotla – not Australia, not Pakistan, not South Africa, not anyone else.
Questions For Kohli, Shastri
On the eve of the Test match, the Indian selectors will be faced with a happy problem – a problem of plenty; not only do the captain and coach have variety in the squad, they also have all the players in form.
The decisions Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri will be called upon to make are deciding on the opening combination, and deciding if the team should tweak the bowling combination and look at including a third spinner in the place of a batsman.
The coach and captain will also have to decide on the new-ball pairing; should India persist with the in-form Ishant Sharma and pair him with Mohammed Shami, allowing Umesh Yadav some recovery time?
The Kotla has the reputation of being a spinner’s paradise, and therefore one would expect – unless the conditions are drastically different to what we’ve seen there over the years – that the team management will consider including Kuldeep Yadav in the eleven. There’s a school of thought that a third spinner in the eleven might be surplus and be under-utilised, but ask a few captains and most will prefer having an additional resource available to them than not having it.
In the last two Test matches played at the Kotla, spinners have taken 49 of the 69 wickets to have been picked up by bowlers at the Kotla. So there’s enough reason to boost the spin bowling department.
Looking back, one wouldn’t be too far off the mark in saying Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja ran amok in the last two Tests at the Kotla. The off-spinner and the left-arm spinner have shared seven wickets in each of the last four innings they’ve bowled in, at the Kotla.
Both spinners will have fond memories of playing at the venue. It was at the Kotla that Ashwin made his Test debut and has since raced to become the fastest bowler to 300 Test wickets, while Jadeja has astonishing returns in previous visits to the venue. So one wouldn’t even be contemplating giving them a rest.
The Openers Conundrum
The Indian team has now realised at least one half-century from its openers in each of the last 13 Test matches. No matter what the opening combination used, Team India has generally had at least one opener making a reasonable score. Parthiv Patel and Abhinav Mukund did a fair job as stand-in openers, while Murali Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan and KL Rahul have consistently done the job every time they’ve had the opportunity.
Picking the two openers will perhaps be the most difficult decision for captain Kohli and coach Shastri. Before his failure in the Nagpur Test, KL Rahul had made 9 half-centuries in 11 Test innings.
In the previous Test, Murali Vijay announced his return to the Indian team with a solidly compiled 128 and laid the foundation for the win. In the series opener in Kolkata, Shikhar Dhawan scored an attacking 94 in the second innings.
Going plainly on the basis of numbers, one would have to say Rahul should be left out, for he’s made the fewest runs in the most-recent outing. But then, there are several other factors which come into play.
It is a given that Rahul is the technically and temperamentally superior opener – particularly when compared to Dhawan. But then, Dhawan is acknowledged as a match-winner – someone who can decimate the opposition in a session – and has consistently piled on the runs against Sri Lanka in recent times.
Further, add the sentimental element that the Test match will be played in Delhi – Dhawan’s home ground – and there’s enough reason to bring him back into the mix.
Even if it would be extremely cruel, I expect the team management to ask Rahul to warm the bench for the Delhi Test, and allow Vijay and Dhawan to open the innings.
Are Kohli and Shastri thinking along similar lines? We will know when the captain announces the team prior to the start of the Test match. You can follow live updates from the third Test on our live blog here. The Test match begins at 9:30 am IST.
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