India and England will meet for the third and penultimate Test, of the four-match Test series, on February 24 (Wednesday) with the series leveled and nicely poised at 1-1. While the match will be the first-ever to be held at the newly-revamped Motera Stadium, Ahmedabad — the world’s largest cricket stadium — it will also be a day-night encounter.
Thus, this will be India’s third day-night Test overall and only their second at home. As India are once again to be challenged under lights, that too versus England’s highly-potent pace attack, Cheteshwar Pujara recalled the Adelaide horror and assured the Indian fans that the same script won’t repeat this time around in Ahmedabad.
“It’s a different ball game in Australia. The ball was seaming around a lot, we had one bad session which led to disaster. Overall, in the first innings we were still in a dominating position. Here we’re playing in familiar conditions, the ball is also different. We’re very confident that we’ll put up a good show and we’ll not look back at what has happened in the past,” Pujara told reporters on Saturday.
He further opined, “Experience doesn’t matter a lot playing one-off pink ball Tests. It’s Test cricket and we’ll have similar game plans we had in the last match depending on how the pitch is.”
Recently, Pujara was also back in the IPL after the MS Dhoni-led Chennai Super Kings (CSK) attained him in the auction at his base price, Rs 50 lakhs, for the IPL 2021 edition. To this, Pujara revealed, “It’s good to be back in the IPL again. At the same time, when talking about county cricket, I still have time before the England series. There’s a window after the IPL gets over where I can play a few county games. I’ll take a call (on heading to England) when the IPL gets over or midway through the IPL.”
