The T20 World Cup 2022-bound Indian team left for Australia early morning on Thursday.
The Indian team will first travel to Perth where they will play a practice match against Western Australian state team.
Post that, they will travel to Brisbane to play official T20 World Cup warm-up matches against Australia and New Zealand at The Gabba on October 17 and 19 respectively.
This means, they will get a week to adjust to the Australian conditions.
Ahead of the departure, India head coach Rahul Dravid explained on why the side has been departing early for Australia.
“We will get an opportunity to spend a few days and sessions in Perth and then have a couple of matches there.”
“Australia is quite unique in terms of the pace and bounce on those wickets and a lot of our players have not played a lot of T20 cricket in Australia,” said Dravid.
Interestingly, two key players from the team – Suryakumar Yadav and Arshdeep Singh haven’t had the experience of playing competitive cricket in the Australia.
Harshal Patel and Deepak Hooda have toured Australia but as members of India U19 side in 2009 and 2013 respectively.
Even reserve leg-spinner, Ravi Bishnoi has never played cricket in Australia.
“The idea was to give ourselves a chance to practice a little bit more, get acclimatised (to the conditions) and get some game time in to practice.”
“Having been to Australia before (in his playing days), it takes some time to get used to that pace and bounce and hopefully once we practice, we would be able to have discussions around the sessions, strategies and tactics of how we need to play,” said Dravid.
India, are in Group 2 of Super 12 stage at T20 World Cup, alongside Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa and two qualifiers.
They will open their campaign in a high voltage match against arch-rivals Pakistan on October 23 at the MCG.
This will be followed by matches on October 27 (against first qualifier side at SCG), October 30 (against South Africa at Perth Stadium), November 2 (against Bangladesh at Adelaide Oval) and November 6 (against second qualifier side at MCG).
The T20 World Cup will get underway from October 16 with the final slated for November 13.
India have been pooled in Group 2 alongside Pakistan, South Africa, Bangladesh and two qualifiers.
Last year, India exited from the group stage itself after losing their opening two matches to Pakistan and New Zealand.
India T20 squad:
Rohit Sharma (c), KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Deepak Hooda, Rishabh Pant, Dinesh Karthik, Hardik Pandya, R Ashwin, Yuzvendra Chahal, Axar Patel, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Harshal Patel, Arshdeep Singh. Standby Players: Mohammad Shami, Shreyas Iyer, Ravi Bishnoi, Deepak Chahar.
