England’s pack leader James Anderson says that he will go to bed while dreaming about getting Virat Kohli out. India is 84 runs away from the emphatic win in the first Test match and England knows that they need to get past Virat Kohli to increase their chances of the win.
Kohli has had a majestic Test match thus far as he has scored almost 200 runs. He is unconquered on 43 and therefore he is carrying India’s hope on his shoulders. In fact, Kohli has been the lone warrior as he hasn’t received much support from the other end.
Get Kohli, win the match.
Meanwhile, Virat Kohli has played cautiously against James Anderson. Kohli vs Anderson battle is going to be the highlight of the series. In fact, the Indian skipper has kept England’s talisman at bay.
“We’ll go to bed dreaming about getting Kohli out first thing,” admitted Anderson.
“We need five wickets, simple as that, fairly quickly – otherwise, they’ll get the runs,” said Anderson. “We’ve just got to give it everything we’ve got in the morning for the first 15-20 overs – leave absolutely nothing out there. It’s a really exciting place tobe,because you know we could do something special tomorrow by winning this. It’s such a close Test match.”
Meanwhile, James Anderson also rued the missed chances in the slip cordon. Dawid Malan gave two lives to Virat Kohli on the score of 21 and 51. Thus, the hosts had to pay the price for the poor catching.
Slip Catching has been Kryptonite for both teams.
“It’s an area where we’ve struggled for two years now. The personnel in the team has changed quite a lot, so it’s been difficult to get a set cordon. But we’re just going to have to keep working harder and harder, pushing ourselves to be better, because you can’t keep creating the chances we are and not taking them. You can’t drop Virat Kohli on 21 (Anderson was the bowler) because he’s one of the best players in the world, and he’ll capitalize on that – which he did”.
According to Cricviz, England have dropped 81 catches since 2016. Furthermore, 44 out of 81 chances have been fluffed in the slip cordon. Anderson added that they need to work harder on their slip catching.
“We’ve spoken about it because of the number of drops in the last two years, maybe even longer. When I was in the team that got to number one in the world, we caught everything. We had an amazing cordon, very fortunate, that was settled. At the minute, we’re struggling a little bit. All we can do is work extremely hard at it, and hope to improve.”
On the other hand, India also has its issues with the slip catching as they have bungled a plethora of chances.
