The stage is set as Australia and India are both ready to sweat it out in yet another cracking edition of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. The series gets underway from Thursday in Nagpur and shots have already been fired from both camps. The chatter has mostly been around the Indian pitches as Australia also hired a R Ashwin “duplicate” to tackle the carrom-ball specialist in the blockbuster clash.
Ashwin will hold the key heading into the series, as he is the seniormost spinner from the Indian camp, and boasts of a superb record against the Aussies. Ashwin has so far scalped 89 wickets in the 18 Tests he has played against Australia, which is also his highest against any other teams.
Sharing his thoughts on the same, star Australian batter Usman Khawaja called the Indian a “gun” but is optimistic about passing the challenge with flying colours. He made the remarks during an interaction with Sydney Herald.
“Ashwin is a gun. He’s very skillful, he’s got a lot of tricky little variations, he uses the crease quite well too,” said Khawaja.
“If you asked me the same question when I was younger, I probably wouldn’t have been able to answer a lot of things because I didn’t really learn about how to face what off-spinners are doing. But it’s one of those really good challenges. The wicket’s going to turn here at some point, whether day one, day three or day four, and he (Ashwin) is going to be in the game and bowl a lot of overs. So it’s all about figuring out how I’m going to play against him, how I’m going to score runs against him, what he might do. If you bat a long time against him, he’s going to change his game plans against you,” said Khawaja when asked how he looks forward to beat the challenge.
