Need To Focus On Batting First And Defending Totals: Indian Captain Virat Kohli

India are unstoppable at the moment with their recent success coming against Bangladesh at home as they won T20I series and two-match Test series by 2-1 and 2-0 respectively. Now they are turning their focus towards the upcoming home assignment against West Indies. Indian captain Virat Kohli was spotted hitting the nets yesterday in Hyderabad.

Along with him, Indian vice-captain Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul also sweated it out at the training session to prepare for the T20I opener against West Indies. On the eve of T20I opener, Indian skipper Virat Kohli on Thursday said that India should start focusing on batting well and defending the target so that they can approach the upcoming T20 World Cup with relatively less pressure on their shoulders.

Recently, India won the maximum number of matches while chasing in T20Is. The Men in Blue lost just one match against Bangladesh while batting first at Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi and the same scenario repeated against South Africa at Bengaluru.

Virat Kohli brushes aside current team’s rankings with a solid explanation

It should be noted that India are ranked at the number fifth position in the ICC T20I team rankings. However, Virat Kohli said that they have not played the strongest line-up as they were giving more opportunities to youngsters in the shortest format.

“We need to focus on batting first and defending low totals as well. Those are two things that we need to really focus on, T20 is a format where you can experiment a lot more things than ODIs and Tests. You want to give chances to the youngsters in the shortest format, we have not played the strongest eleven together in T20Is so rankings cannot be considered.

We have the mindset that we will not focus on the rankings. Now heading into the T20 World Cup, we need to take our best team to the field, we would probably be playing our strongest eleven going into the World Cup,” he added.

The first T20I game is scheduled to play on December 6 (Friday) at Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad and the second fixture will be played at Greenfield International Stadium, Kerala on December 8 (Sunday) and the final match will be played at the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai on December 11 (Wednesday). After the Windies series, India are scheduled to play Sri Lanka in a three-match T20I series before hosting Australia in a 3-match ODI series.

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India’s squad for 3 T20Is:

Virat Kohli (C), Rohit Sharma (VC), Shikhar Dhawan, KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Rishabh Pant (WK), Shivam Dube, Washington Sundar, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Deepak Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Bhuvneshwar Kumar

India’s squad for 3 ODIs:

Virat Kohli (C), Rohit Sharma (VC), Shikhar Dhawan, KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Rishabh Pant (WK), Shivam Dube, Kedar Jadhav, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Deepak Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Bhuvneshwar Kumar