In the absence of injured bowler Jasprit Bumrah and wicket-keeper batter Rishabh Pant, former Australian captain Ian Chappell believes that the Australian pace attack in English conditions would give them the upper hand in the World Test Championship (WTC) final versus India the following month.
Shreyas Iyer and KL Rahul are two more players who have been ruled out of the WTC final, which is set to take place from June 7-11. The Indian camp has had quite a few injury worries going up to the WTC final.
Hardik Pandya, who played his final first-class game in 2018, has the potential to be a liability for India, according to Chappell.
“The losses to Jasprit Bumrah and Rishabh Pant are a major blow to India, as the team would have been an overwhelming favorite with both of these players in the lineup. “The somewhat surprising absence of all-rounder Hardik Pandya, who could have provided India with the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, is another blow to India’s chances,” Chappell wrote in a column for ESPNcricinfo. Pandya was expected to be available.
Chappell believes that the fact that the bulk of Indian players would be going into the final after two months of IPL could not affect them as severely as it seems to at this point.
“To make matters even more difficult, several of the players participating have only participated in the Indian Premier League in the lead-up to the one-off Test,” the author writes. “[T]his makes the situation much more challenging. Even while this might not seem like the best way to be ready, it is important to keep in mind what former England batter Ravi Bopara had to say about it.
“T20 got his feet moving and put him in a positive frame of mind,” he remarked, alluding to Bopara’s consecutive hundreds in the Caribbean in 2009, when he moved from the embryonic IPL into a Test series against West Indies. He reckoned he was ideally prepared since T20 had gotten his feet moving and put him in a positive frame of mind.
Chappell is also of the opinion that Australia’s pace attack is superior against India’s, but the Indian team lead by Rohit Sharma has the upper hand in the spin department.