Changes India needs to win overseas

Changes India needs to win overseas: The Indian cricket team is known to be Lions at home; beating the weakest of the Indian teams ever has been a tough tasks for strongest of opponents. Very consistent and dominant in home conditions, but when they tour overseas one see’s them struggle. There have been many instances where the team have shown the spark, but have rarely succeeded in winning the overseas test series.

The “so near yet too far” kind of scenarios have become very common when India visit the foreign soil in recent tours to England, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Indians lack consistency and perform in patches. The most recent example being India’s historic win at the Lord’s in which Ishant Sharma produced a match winning performance of 7/74 and thus the team took a 1-0 lead. In spite of that India failed to win any match thereafter and lost the series.

The debate has started again after India under debutant skipper Virat Kohli narrowly missed to seal the victory inching closer yet failing at the final moment, in the first test of the Border Gavaskar series at Sydney.

The last time India won a test in Australia, was way back in the year 2007-2008. The series was marred by poor umpiring decisions. After losing the first two matches of the series, Indian team led by Anil Kumble fought back extremely well to win the third test at Perth. Ishant Sharma performed extremely well and Irfan Pathan was adjudged as the man of the match for his victorious effort. They still lost the test series 2-1, as the last match of the tour was drawn.

The Indian team which toured Australia in 2007/08 which had the likes of Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble, Irfan Pathan and Harbhajan Singh. Achieved rare success and to a great extent dominated the Aussie’s in their own backyard. They were aggressive in their approach of playing and were highly experienced.

The current visiting team lacks the big names in their line up as most of them have retired and some are out of favor. But the young pool of players like Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Rohit Sharma, and Ravichandran Ashwin most of whom are here for the first or second time are promising and have great potentials to replace them and repeat the performances of the past heroes. Especially, Virat Kohli who has scored centuries in both the innings of the first test just a few days ago. Others whose shoulders bare majority of the expectations are Cheteshwar Pujara, Murali Vijay and Varun Aaron who have also done well though in patches.

One factor which this Indian team generally lacks is a fast bowling all-rounder, someone like Irfan Pathan. Most of the teams who have been successful in Australia have had good fast bowling all-rounders. But recently there has been a dearth in this department for India. Irfan Pathan was the perfect option but is not in his best of form and India has failed to find a replacement for him though Stuart Binny has been around but hasn’t been as much efficient.

The batsmans have done a fair job in the first test  as well as in the past. If India needs to win matches in overseas conditions they have to find the right balance in their bowling attack. The bowling attack should have the ability to pick 20 wickets. The current team has promising pace attack lead by Ishant Sharma along with Varun Aaron, Mohd Shami, Umesh Yadav and Dhawal Kulkarni. They should prove their potentials, go out their give the Australians taste of some Indian pace bowling, an inspired fast bowler can run through best of the batting lineup’s and if anybody from these four decides to make Gabba their own strip. Yes! India does have a chance of walking back proud, registering a win over Australia playing Down Under.