Rahul Dravid opens up about India A's tour to England
What's the story?
The India A cricket team put up a solid performance in England, winning the ODI series against West Indies A and England A and then going on to defeat West Indies A in a Test series.
Unfortunately, they lost out to the England Lions in the final Test. Rahul Dravid, who is the coach of the side, opened up about his side's performance.
"We had a lot of positives and some learning as well. We definitely could have done better in the batting department in the final game, but against a strong England Lions side, it was a great lesson for the batsmen on how to play in English conditions. From a coaching perspective, there were a lot of lessons that we learnt through the course of this trip,” Dravid said while speaking to BCCI.tv
In case you didn't know...
The India A side won the ODI series with ease and then made a spectacular comeback in both the Tests against West Indies A, winning the second one and thus taking the series.
However, their batting did not hold up against the England Lions, which led to their loss.
Rishabh Pant and Prithvi Shaw performed extremely well with the bat, with many big knocks coming from their bats.
The details
Along with the regular India A cricketers, Ajinkya Rahane and Murali Vijay too joined the side to take on the England Lions. While Rahane performed reasonably well, Vijay failed in both the innings. However, this gave the young India A side a good experience of interacting with the two Indian stars.
“A lot of players have joined the national side from this team. It also gave an opportunity to Ajinkya Rahane and M Vijay to come down and spend time with us and play a practice game that was competitive and tough," said Dravid.
What's next?
With India A's spectacular performance in England, we could surely expect quite a few of these players to make it big. In fact, Rishabh Pant has been included in India's Test squad to take on England. The first Test between the two sides will take place on August 1.