Virat Kohli

Cheteshwar Pujara

Ishant Sharma

Test cricket

Australian public knows different forms of Indian captain’s aggression. In the 2011-12 series, he showed them a middle-finger while fielding on the boundary line, in 2014-15 he let his bat show aggression with multiple tons on the tour. Although he couldn’t win India any series, his performance established him as one of the premier batsmen in the world.Kohli is in Australia again. On Wednesday he will lead India out at Brisbane for the first of the three T20s before the four-Test and three ODI series. And Kohli has defined what aggression will mean this time: Winning at all costs.Speaking to the media Kohli said, “Aggression depends on the situation on the field. If the opposition is showing aggression, you have to counter it. We have never been the team that starts the argument. We always draw the line of our self-respect. If we feel that something is crossing that line then we stand against it. But aggression can also mean how possessive about a situation you are within the team and how much effort you are putting to get each wicket. Bowlers’ is show in how much time he can maintain his line and length. For me, aggression is about the passion to win and an obsession to win every ball for your team. For me, it is to win a match at all cost and giving it 120 per cent while batting, fielding or clapping for someone from the dressing room.”This passion and obsession has kept Kohli under spotlight all the time but the Indian captain says that he doesn’t get distracted by what is being said about him. “These are things that are uncontrollable. I don’t think anyone aims to be at the centre of everything. It is basically about focusing on what are the right things to do and that is what I try and do. All the noise outside is as influencing as you want it to be so I usually stay away from all this. I focus on what I need to do, which is work hard at practice, think where team needs to head and help my teammate as much as possible. Those are my priorities, I don’t really think of anything apart from that.”The Indian team has been in cracking white ball form and the Australian skipper Aaron Finch paid compliment to them when he said that this Indian team has no weak link. Kohli on his part was modest while talking about his team when he said, “We definitely have a very strong side. I don’t think there is any side in the world that doesn’t have any weaknesses or points that they don’t need to keep working on. We as a side keep striving to figure out what we need to work on and take our quality of cricket up. When we step onto the field we have 11 individuals who are striving for excellence and they want to be the best that they can be on that day.”Australia, on the other hand, is looking seriously vulnerable in the aftermath of the ball-tampering saga and the subsequent bans of Steve Smith, David Warner and Camron Bancroft. Kohli said that the absence won’t mean that India would take Australia any lightly. “I don’t think I want to speak about that again and again. The vulnerability factor as I said depends on how the team plays on that particular day. I have always said that as much experience that you might have but still a newcomer can come and make an impact as long as they believe they can. When you step out on the field, everyone has an equal opportunity of pulling off an upset. The Australian team is more than capable of that even after losing their quality batsmen. We definitely will have to be at our absolute best.”Kohli said that the team won’t be taking anything for granted. “To be honest, they still have world class cricketers. They are obviously missing out on two of their world-class batsmen, which is not an ideal thing for any team but even then they have guys, especially in the limited overs game, who can do damage. We have come here to compete against Australia, the team and will not take anything for granted regardless of any kind of situation. Our focus is on winning. We haven’t played against them after the ball-tampering issue so I can’t say what the atmosphere is going to be.”Having missed out in England and South Africa, this Australia tour offers possibly the last chance to players like Kohli, M Vijay,and a couple of others to win a Test series in place out of their comfort zones. The next Test series in these nations might come only after four years. But Kohli is not looking at things from this angle. As he said, “We are not thinking in terms of this being the last opportunity for us to win in Australia or we might not come here again. I don’t think that is the right kind of mindset to have. But whatever series we play, the aim is to win that series. We don’t want to be a team that wins one odd Test match here and there.We have figured out our mistakes in England, which I mentioned were very radical. The quality of cricket was high but our mistakes were also radical and that’s why we lost the games. We have the ability to compete with the teams at par. Inwhichever team makes lesser mistakes win. We are focusing on cutting down our mistakes. Australia is obviously a big tour for any Indian side that comes here. We played good cricket last time but were not able to win games. This time around we want to change that and any team should be looking to win a test series. We have the quality but it will boil down to how we think at each moment. Our limited over form has been good and we just want to continue that.”