I genuinely believe that India is a better team than South Africa and it will become even more obvious as this series will progress. The next series between these two teams, wherever it happens will be totally dominated by India.
Kohli is an excellent captain who is making the right decisions. This also includes backing players like Rohit over Rahane and Dhawan over Rahul. This is letting guys know that they need to play a certain brand of cricket to be considered as Indian players and that's a great message to deliver. Maybe Rahul over Dhawan is a 50/50 where he went in with his gut feel but Rohit is an amazing player and there's no batsman his calibre in the world right now. It's about time that he will start delivering in tests as well.
This is something that Indian fans may not see now but this is what Pakistani teams used to do in the past. Play cricketers who had higher ceilings and ability to do something out of the ordinary rather than pick a generic good to average reliable cricketer. Yes, some of the players that were backed like Manzoor Akhtar never amounted to anything good but it also created an aggressive dna for our teams in the past and people knew that to play they needed to have a certain mongrel within them.
Kohli and Shastri are a great combination, and they definitely are way above everything that we have right now. As a cricketing nation, we are struggling and there are no immediate signs of it getting better any time soon.
There are really no dead rubbers in a test series. Even if we're 0-2 down, I would be happy if we won the final test and made it 2-1. It's better than nothing.
There are really no dead rubbers in a test series. Even if we're 0-2 down, I would be happy if we won the final test and made it 2-1. It's better than nothing.