The Indian team, during the recent New Zealand tour, faced a massive 3-nil whitewash at the hands of the hosts.
However, it was Indian captain Virat Kohli’s comments which hogged all the limelight, wherein he mentioned at a press conference about ODI games being irrelevant in the 2020 cricketing calendar.
According to Kohli, with ICC T20 World Cup and World Test Championship lined up, there isn’t any relevance for bilateral ODI series.
Indian pace legend, Ashish Nehra, well renowned for his blunt remarks, did not approve of Kohli’s comments which came off as an excuse for not winning the ODI matches in New Zealand.
“If you win and tell this it’s a different thing. It’s wrong to say that the year is for T20s and so we don’t care about 50-over matches…if it doesn’t matter then why did you even come to play. Are you trying to tell that the Indian team didn’t try to win those ODI matches against New Zealand? I don’t agree with Virat Kohli’s statement,” Nehra told his former Delhi teammate Aakash Chopra.
After comprehensively defeating New Zealand in the T20I series by a margin of 5-0, India lost all the remaining ODIs and Test matches.
In Nehra’s words, there is no comparison for Virat as a player, but Virat -the captain, is still a ‘work in progress’.
“Virat Kohli as a player needs no recognition as his career graph tells the entire story. Kohli as a player has done amazingly well, in captaincy I still feel he is a work in progress. I can say he is a little bit impulsive captain,” the pacer added.
In conclusion, Nehra claimed that it would be wrong to compare the world-beating champions side of Australia to the current Indian team.
“This Indian team is far from the Australia team. You are talking about an Australian team which won 3 consecutive World Cups, reached the final in 1996, won 18-19 Test matches in home and away conditions. It’s not like this Indian team can not reach there but I believe the core group is very important. A person gets confused after watching many dishes on the table and so it’s important to have fewer but better dishes,” Nehra concluded.
