Ahead of the India-Pakistan clash at the Asia Cup 2022, Indian skipper Rohit Sharma has strong stated that his team won’t look at Pakistan any differently than they do with other teams.
India, who are yet to lose a series under Rohit’s captaincy since he took over the full-time job last year, are coming off a 2-1 and a 4-1 T20I series victories over England and West Indies.
They will take on Pakistan on August 28 in Dubai.
“My thought has always been that we will not focus on the opponent, but we will continue to play our game. We played against West Indies, England and in both cases, we did not think about who our opposition was, but we focused on things that we had to do as a team and what we had to achieve. Similarly, in the Asia Cup, our focus will be on what to achieve as a team and not think about who we are facing – be it Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka,” Rohit Sharma said on Wednesday.
India-Pakistan encounters in the ICC events have largely been one-sided in the past dozen years with the Men In Blue emerging triumphant most of the time. However, they were thrashed by 10 wickets by Babar Azam’s team last year at the T20 World Cup in Dubai.
Rohit Sharma’s warning ahead of Asia Cup game with Pakistan
Sharma, though, asserted that now the times and teams and circumstances have changed from last year when India failed to qualify for the semis – tacitly pointing at the way India have adopted a new brand of aggressive batting in T20 cricket in recent months, abolishing the conservative approach they’d had until last year.
“Asia Cup is happening after a long time, but we played Pakistan last year in Dubai, where obviously the result did not go our way. But the Asia Cup is different now. The team is playing differently and has prepared differently, so a lot of things have changed from then. But for us, we need to assess the conditions, keep in mind the fact that we will be playing in 40-plus degrees. We need to assess all those factors and prepare accordingly,” the Indian captain pointed out.
Both India and Pakistan have announced their Asia Cup squads:
India: Rohit Sharma (c), KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Rishabh Pant, Deepak Hooda, Dinesh Karthik, Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, R Ashwin, Yuzvendra Chahal, Ravi Bishnoi, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Arshdeep Singh, Avesh Khan. Standbys: Shreyas Iyer, Axar Patel, Deepak Chahar.
Pakistan: Babar Azam (c), Shadab Khan, Asif Ali, Fakhar Zaman, Haider Ali, Haris Rauf, Iftikhar Ahmed, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Nawaz, Mohammad Rizwan, Mohammad Wasim Jnr, Naseem Shah, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Shahnawaz Dahani, Usman Qadir.
