Statistical analysis of India's overseas Test performances in 2018

Kohli as a captain needs to learn from his mistakes

Kohli is going through a tough phase as India's Test captain

The role of a captain is very important in a team, both during victories and defeats. In Kohli’s case, some of his team selections have been baffling to the say the least, especially the one where Rohit was given preference over Rahane for the initial part of the SA series when the former wasn’t even considered in the home Tests. And his chopping and changing policy has affected the confidence of quite a few players, as quoted by a player in a recent interview. Though Kohli might have implemented them with good intentions, he needs to understand how the players are getting affected by these decisions and realize that a player is only as good as his captain believes him to be. Kohli is still young when it comes to overseas captaincy and he needs to learn some of these aspects through his mistakes and improve as a captain.

To conclude, India’s twin overseas Test defeats can be attributed mainly to the fact that their batting lineup isn’t proper yet. Some of the experienced players aren’t putting their hand up enough and some of the players are youngsters who are just making their way in the Test format. To experiment and rectify all these problems would require at least 3-4 Test series. After playing at home for long, all of India’s batting problems were exposed at once in SA this year. And in between the SA and England series, India played only 1 Test match, which is definitely not enough to rectify even one problem, leave alone all. As much as we want our Indian team to win abroad, we should also be practical enough to realize what is possible within this short time. The team showed improvements on various aspects in England compared to SA and if we can keep making constant progress with every series, we will surely become one of the best travelling teams in maybe 10-12 months from now.