Kolkata: India ODI captain Mithali Raj revealed the team has been facing some challenges. The players are facing anxiety, and a lack of ‘sense of purpose’ and have not played any ‘competitive cricket or any international series, even domestic for that matter’ in the COVID-19-affected world.
The T20 world cup in Australia ended in March, and since then India haven’t played any competitive cricket. Their scheduled tour of England in July-August was cancelled by the BCCI due to the pandemic.
“There’s been this anxiety about what’s the future, what the future tournaments are because right now we don’t know for what we’re training,” Mithali told moderator Lisa Sthalekar during an ICC 100% Cricket virtual discussion.
“There needs to be a purpose. Before, we used to plan for any international series if it is an away-going [tour], so players would accordingly prepare. And if it’s a home series we prepared accordingly, but now we don’t know why we train.”
“So, sometimes we do feel there’s no sense of purpose if we don’t have competitive cricket or any international series, even domestic for that matter,” she said. Mithali also stated the resumption of training has thrown different challenges to the players.
“But one positive is that things are slowly improving in terms of access to the facilities; but again, there are a few changes in terms of all the training facilities work on time slots. Like, earlier, we would just walk in and start batting and we would have some good 10-15 net bowlers and we could bat for one to two hours,” she said. “But, now, you have to go in during the time slot you’re given, and maybe the net bowlers are reduced to just two or three of them.
“So these are the changes as current players we’re accepting. But I think [we’re] having optimism that at some point we’ll have matches, and that’s why all of us are still into our fitness training trying to keep up to the standards before we were in the lockdown.”
