India captain Virat Kohli has insisted he will be fit for the third Test at Trent Bridge next Saturday – sort of. Kohli has been troubled by a chronic back injury in recent months, which flared up again at Lord’s, forcing him to bat in severe pain. He failed to take the field at the start of day four, and dropped down a place in the batting order during India’s second innings due to his injury-enforced absence.
But after India’s defeat by an innings and 159 runs, leaving India 2-0 down in the five-match series, Kohli said he was determined to bat in Nottingham, albeit not at full mobility. “I am confident I should be ready for the next game, although not at the same intensity in the field,” he said. “But good enough to hold a position in the field and be 100 per cent with the bat.”
“As of now, it’s sore, I’m not hiding that fact. It happened in the latter half of the last leg of the South Africa tour [earlier this year] when I missed a T20 game. But it’s part of the game. Five days is enough time to be ready for the next Test.”
Kohli or no Kohli, India’s prospects in the series look bleak. Apart from their captain, no specialist batsman has scored more than 26 in any of their four innings this series. “We haven’t been able to have partnerships, which is the basic rule,” Kohli lamented. “There’s no running from it, there’s no hiding from it. When the situation arises, we’ve got to step up.”
Even though only one team has come back from 2-0 behind to win a series in the 141-year history of Test cricket – Don Bradman’s Australians in 1936-37 – Kohli was still characteristically upbeat about his side’s chances. “This is the first game when we’ve been outplayed,” he said. “A side like England, when they play like that, can outplay anybody. There’s no hiding from the fact that mistakes have been made. We have to not make them again. We’re not thinking about anything else but going 2-1 in the series and from there, build on that strongly.”
England captain Joe Root paid tribute to his team, but rebuffed all talk of a 5-0 whitewash. “If you get too far ahead of yourself, this game has got a funny way of biting back at you,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure we turn up at Trent Bridge, continue to keep learning and get better. We haven’t played the perfect performance yet.”
