Kohli ready with his vision for Indian cricket

“It is pretty special. I never thought at 26 I will be <g data-gr-id="70">captain</g> of India Test side. My only dream as a child was to play Test cricket for India. Over the <g data-gr-id="69">years</g> I have matured in my mind. The people around me in BCCI and my teammates thought that I was the right guy for the job. I am pretty 

grateful for that,” Kohli said in the pre-match press conference.

“I have some vision in my mind which I have discussed with the team. We are all on the same page. It is pretty exciting for me to start as full-time Test captain and hopefully it is a positive start,” he added.

Talking about the playing eleven for the match, Kohli gave enough hint that he will go with five bowlers and six batsmen.

“I certainly believe in giving the team a chance to pick up 20 wickets. I am a big fan of playing five bowlers in a 6-5 combination. You only need two to three batsmen to click to get a score of 500,” he said.

The Indian team arrived in Dhaka on Tuesday and hours later they were seen <g data-gr-id="66">practising</g> at the Shere-Bangla Stadium.

Asked about the team getting enough preparation time for the five-day affair, Kohli said: “We only have one Test match so we can afford to push ourselves to the limit. Had it been a three or four-Test series so there would be need to contain our energy.

“Right now the priority is to get into game intensity. We are training hard so that guys get into the mindset of the game. You need to build that momentum in practice and they (the players) need to be ready to deliver from ball one. On Tuesday practice session is going to be a light one but we have pushed ourselves in the last few days,” he said.

He asserted his team did not need to pay much attention to how the pitch would play out.

“Wickets in Bangladesh are similar everywhere. There is no change of soil. Most of the guys have played here last year. We will pretty much know the wicket will play. You don't really need to practice again and again in places where you have played a lot of cricket. Bangladesh is a place where we have played a lot of cricket. It is not going to make that much of a difference in terms of preparations,” added Kohli.

The Indian team on Tuesday rested their bowlers during the hour-long net session at the Khan Saheb Osman Ali Stadium on the eve of their one-off Test match against Bangladesh, starting on Wednesday.

“The humidity is killing and the coaching staff thought that the boys should not stress themselves too much in this heat and hence we trained for an hour on Tuesday. The bowling unit was rested as they will have a job in hand on Wednesday,” a source close to the team management told PTI, explaining the reason for <g data-gr-id="76">short</g> duration of training.

Another interesting aspect in team’s planning and preparation was separate meetings for the batsmen as well as the bowlers -- a concept which of late has not been employed.

“The bowling unit had a separate meeting where coach Bharath Arun addressed them while the batsmen were addressed by Ravi Shastri. The boys are really charged up despite the heat and humidity. The batsmen and the bowlers have been specifically briefed about the basic strategy going into the match,” the source informed.

During Sourav Ganguly’s tenure as captain, there used to be a ‘Batting Captain’, Bowling Captain’ and ‘Fielding captain’ -- something that the team members used to designate amongst themselves.

Even in 2012 IPL, the Delhi Daredevils used to have a specific bowlers’ meeting where they would discuss the previous match and also talk about the strategy for the upcoming match.

It has been reliably learnt that both Shastri and Virat Kohli are looking at the option of playing a third seamer apart from two spinners as the pitch despite a grass cover seems to be a flat deck which has been the nature of the 22-yard strip in Fatullah over the years.