Former India spinner Ravichandran Ashwin has delivered a bold and strategic message ahead of the second Test against England at Edgbaston: forget chasing wickets – pressure is the real weapon.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!“The whole point of ‘going for the wickets’, be it Test cricket or T20 cricket, is all a lie. Pressure gives you wickets,” Ashwin said, in a brutally honest assessment of India’s bowling approach during the ongoing Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy. “When a bowler keeps a batter at one end for 10 balls and then delivers a good ball, that’s what we call rhythm.”
India lost the first Test in Leeds despite scoring five centuries – a historic anomaly. Only once before in Test cricket history has a team lost after notching four hundreds in a match – Australia against England in Melbourne, 1928.
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England’s blistering 371-run chase, completed in just 82 overs, is now their second-highest fourth-innings pursuit. That aggressive brand of cricket, now globally dubbed “Bazball,” is likely to continue, but with one key exception – Jasprit Bumrah.“It’s not about how many overs Jasprit Bumrah will bowl. It’s about how we keep the pressure on if Bumrah isn’t bowling,” Ashwin told Wisden. “This game is very straightforward – ‘We will play Bumrah carefully and then Bazball everyone else’. That is pretty much what England will do.”
Ashwin urged India’s bowlers to take a more defensive and containment-focused approach to counter this.“As a bowling unit, we should make strategies to play some defensive, negative cricket. The kind of wickets England are making, we should play negative, defensive cricket and ask our bowlers to contain them more,” he said.
