A year ago I was listening to one of the Interviews of Pakistan’s great Inzamam Ul Haq where he was asked about Virat Kohli’s lean patch on a 2014 tour of England to which batting giant replied why Asian players are judged on how they score on foreign tour especially in England and Australia.
He further added that none of the media outlets ask James Anderson on how he bowls in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka as every cricket fan knows that Anderson’s record at home pitches is phenomenal in comparison to how he bowls in the subcontinent.
Recently when New Zealand was bowled out on only 60 runs in the first T20 International against Bangladesh many New Zealand experts were unhappy with the kind of pitches Bangladesh gave to Kiwis but no one raises questions when New Zealand, England, Australia make a hard deck and bouncy tracks to support their fast bowlers.
ICC doesn’t interfere with the home board and as per the rules home teams can prepare pitches in the way they want to prepare so raising questions for pitches by foreign media is simply not acceptable at all.
Let’s take an example of Kohli who had a lean patch in 2014 tour of England where he was constantly nicking the ball outside the off stumps and the ace batsman termed that phase as the worst moment of his cricketing career but when he visited England on 2018 tour he was in Sublime touch where he scored 593 runs at an average close to 60 with two hundred under his belt.
Taking about the current series in 2021 where Kohli is encountering the same problem where he has amassed only 126 runs barring the fourth Test match where he is still playing and has crossed more than 23 thousand International runs in world cricket.
So the crux of this article is not to judge a player based on how he/she does on away tours and if that is the benchmark it should be applicable to all foreign bowlers /batsmen and how they perform in Sub Continent.