Australian cricket team will reportedly travel to Dubai before commencing their India tour next month to play four Test match series which starts from February 23. This step has been taken by CA in a quest to acclimatise to conditions in India, which are pretty much similar to that in Dubai. This will be sort of a preparatory camp for Aussies during which they will also play two practice games against boys selected from Pakistan Super League teams.
“India is not going to be the same everywhere,” Cricket Australia’s high-performance general manager Pat Howard told Fairfax Media.
“What they can do in Dubai is do a lot of different preparation with different types of pitches. The ICC have done a really good job where they’ll have different pitches of the cities… so it’s not just spin pitches, there are different types,” said Howard. ”We cannot copy what we are going to get. It’s all about the mindset that we’re going to adapt. We can’t get practice against (Ravichandran) Ashwin and (Ravindra) Jadeja either,” he added.
On their last tour to India in the year 2013, Australia team was whitewashed by hosts by a margin of 4-0. On that abortive tour, Australian batsmen were struggling especially against the spin. In order to get a deep knowledge of pitches and to tackle the spin issues, the Aussies will travel U.A.E.
In the past, England team has also travelled to UAE ahead of their tour to India in the year 2012. The England team bamboozled Indian team as they won the series by a margin of 2-1, coming back in the series after losing the first game. West Indies also landed in the academy ahead of T20 World Cup 2016 and they went on to win the cup.
Australian players will look to garner as much as benefits from the preparatory camp in the gulf country in order to prevent themselves from producing the same results which they did four years back.