Google News Ravi Shastri explains why it is important to come to Australia early
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Ravi Shastri emphasized how important it is for the team to arrive for preparations in Australia earlier and how much it will mean. "That's something we've been talking about for a while, like when you go on big tours, you need to prepare well, especially when you travel outside India.
You need to have time in hand to prepare the way you want to prepare, because it takes time," Rohit said, as quoted by cricbuzz. "A lot of the guys are not used to playing in foreign conditions, be it Australia, South Africa, England, New Zealand, and all those countries.
It's always nice to have time in hand, and this was a conscious effort from the team management, BCCI, that come the big tournament, we want to have time in hand to prepare ourselves, and the talk of having time in hand started right after the last World Cup.
"We said, we know where the World Cup is happening, and we made a very conscious decision of going to Australia a little earlier than expected because we were supposed to play the series against South Africa which unfortunately we all had to miss to prepare for this big event.
That is something that was happening in the background right after the World Cup. We know how key the preparation is. A lot of the guys [Suryakumar Yadav, Arshdeep Singh, Harshal Patel and Deepak Hooda] who are part of this team have not been to Australia, so that was also one of the reasons we wanted to come here early."
Shastri on his team
Shastri is happy with how things went and is optimistic about the next challenges that await them "We had a great time in Perth.
We were there for nine days, and then we came to Brisbane. We prepared, we played a couple of practice games in Perth just to get used to the conditions, the pitches. Obviously you can't travel all around Australia and play on all pitches, but we could get whatever we could get.
I thought Perth was the right time for us to start. Obviously, the time difference is not too much, also, so you can easily get acclimatised to the time zone, and that was also one of the reasons. I thought the way we went about the entire Perth leg was good for us.
We could specifically focus on certain things when it comes to batting, and the bowlers could work on certain things for all this unique time, and we were lucky enough to get that time in hand to prepare ourselves and come here to Melbourne."
