By IANS,
Melbourne : Australian skipper Ricky Ponting says playing on slow Indian wickets before hosting the prestigious Ashes on bouncy tracks will require quite a few changes in the squad.
The Indian cricket board is yet to reach a formal agreement with Cricket Australia (CA), but it is highly likely that the Australian Test side will have two matches against the feisty Indians on slow, spinning pitches as part of their preparations for the Ashes.
“It’s obviously vastly different, if you look at the squad that we could probably put out for the first Test in Brisbane compared with the squad you’d think about playing on a spinning wicket in India, they’re probably two completely different squads,” Ponting was quoted as saying in The Age Wednesday.
“It’d be nice to get some match hardness into the guys, having not played a lot of Test cricket at that stage, but we’ll come home then and be back into one-day cricket in Australia anyway, so we’ll just have to manage that as well as we can,” he said.
“We won’t be underdone, there’s no doubt about that, we’ll make sure that hopefully every player will get at least two Sheffield Shield games under their belt leading into that first Test, which I think would be really good preparation.”