New season, new challenges

After almost 2 months of a long holiday, the Indian team starts their new seasson, with a short tour of Sri Lanka. The Indian cricket team saw lots of high & lows in the last seasson from winning the ICC Cricket World Cup and being the No.1 Test team; to losing the No.1 Test spot to being clean-swept in two back-to-back overseas Test series – England & Australia.
Despite their overseas performance, India’s performance at home was fantastic, having beaten England by 5-0 in the ODI series and winning the Test series 2-0 & ODIs 4-1 against the West Indies.

But the team was off-color against Australia, facing a 4-0 whitewash again, after already being beaten by England in the same manner. They also failed to make it to finals in CB-Series,
which also affected India’s performance in the Asia Cup resulting in being knocked out of the finals. Previous season’s performance was due to failure with both bat & ball because of a lot of cricket being played and injuries could also be reason behind it. It also showed India’s lacking in bench strenth.

Whatever happened in the previous season is the past and the Indians now face more of an uphill task this season. India start their new season with an away series against Sri Lanka,
to be followed by Tests and T20s against New Zeland, followed by the ICC T20 World Cup and a long home series of England & Australia Test series.

Sri Lanka tour:- One could expect India to start well against Sri-lanka at the beginning. But for India it would not be as easy with the Lankans continually playing good cricket and having beaten Pakistan 3-1 in ODIs and 1-0 in Tests.

New Zeland series:- Looking at current form of the Kiwis against the West Indies, one could expect that India can perform better against the Kiwis in India, but they should still not take it easy as they can surprise any opposition any time.

ICC T20 World Cup:- After winning the 2007 T20 WC India performed fairly badly in the next editions of 2009 & 2010, after making it from Group stages to Super Eighth, India could not win even single match in both editions. This time India are placed in Group A with Afghanistan & England, and fans back in India would expect powerful performances by team as the WC will be played in the subcontinent.

England & Australia series:- The England & Australia series is much awaited after India lost badly to both teams in their country. Fans could expect the Indian team to take revenge and also expect a much better performance in both the series.

Pakistan:- After almost five years, India is set to play Pakistan in 3 ODIs and 2 T20s in the Christmas period when the English team will fly back home after the Tests against India later in December.

Through these new challenges, Indian fans will be looking forward to seeing how India performs in Tests without the classy Rahul Dravid, and who will take his place at No.3. Let us expect that India performs much better than the last season.