Former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen has weighed in on the wickets India will prepare for the Test series against England. He said the BCCI will have no qualms in preparing something that spins.
The test series between India and England will be played over two months and will conclude in March. It will be a five-match series to be played from January 25 in Hyderabad at the Uppal Stadium.
With the India vs England series just a few days away, one of the main talking points is about the kind of pitches there will be. There have been some reports suggesting that BCCI will change ranks for the series to favor their team.
The England team would expect their batsmen to perform better than last time when they toured India. The Three Lions struggled a lot with the bat on their last tour and looked clueless against the Indian spinners.
It will not be a surprise if India prepares changing tracks from day 1. The visiting teams have struggled a lot in the Indian conditions.
Since the last few years. Even the Australian batsmen couldn’t get going because the Indian spinners were on top of them. India clinched the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 3-1. But England is the only team to have defeated the Rohit Sharma-led team at home. They achieved the feat during the 2012 tour when Alastair Cook was the skipper.
Kevin Pietersen played a very important role in the series. The batsman’s best came during the second Test in Mumbai, where he scored 186 runs off 233 balls. England, under the leadership of Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, who have not lost a series, would be eager to replicate the performance of the 2012 tour.
Kevin Pietersen says ‘India won’t be shy about preparing something that spins’ for England Tests
Kevin Pietersen, however, is not sure whether England’s spinners could deliver in the series or not. Kevin Pietersen believes the twists will dictate the terms of the series. The former England cricketer also did not hesitate to say that India will groom senior players, especially after the kind of pitches they received in South Africa. In his Times column, Kevin Pietersen stated:
“So the question is: can England deliver on the spinners they have? That will be what the series dictates. She’s going to turn. In fact I played in Vizag [Visakhapatnam] the other day. He Spinned and Bounced in a T20 Game!
“Given what happened in Cape Town the other week [India won on a pitch favourable to fast bowlers that was marked poor]They’ll have no qualms about setting up something that spins and they’ll say, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
During the tour of South Africa, the pitches heavily favored the seamers and even the Cape Town pitch was rated ‘unsatisfactory’ by the ICC after the match finished in 2 days.
However, after that, Indian captain Rohit Sharma lashed out, saying that one should not complain when the pitches start changing from Day 1 in India. His comments could have been an indication about the pitches India is preparing for the Tests against England.