At the end of India’s tour of South Africa in 2018, one in which the visitors progressively got better and clinched the white-ball legs, then coach Ravi Shastri made a candid confession: that even the painful Test series loss could have been averted if they had reached 10 days before the start of the series. Practice and acclimatization times come at a premium in the modern calendar. More so for India and in the post-pandemic world of crunched schedules.

When they could have played the ODI series against South Africa or rested for an extra week. They opted instead to fly to Perth as early as October 6. Diving into a 10-day camp in representative conditions before the official warm-ups in Brisbane. The plan for the same, Rohit revealed, was set afoot right after the exit from the 2021 T20 World Cup. Is what holds this team in good stead as they look to end a nine-year trophy drought at ICC events.

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We got plenty of time to know the conditions here in Australia

“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 on the eve of the game against Pakistan at the MCG. “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.