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Australian batter Usman Khawaja has labelled India's Ravichandran Ashwin and the spin attack that he leads as the 'hardest challenge' of the upcoming Border-Gavaskar Trophy — A four-match Test series — which begins in Nagpur on Thursday, February 6.
Khawaja arrived in India late due to Visa issues and is expected to open the batting alongside David Warner. The Pakistan-born cricketer will be playing in his first tournament in India, and after being named Australia's 'Test Cricketer of the Year', the southpaw is expected to lead the batting in his team's quest to win their first series in India since 2004-05.
"Ashwin is a gun. He is very skilful, he is got a lot of tricky little variations, and he uses the crease quite well too. If you asked me the same question when I was younger, I probably wouldn't have been able to answer a lot of things because I didn’t really learn about how to face what off-spinners are doing," Khawaja told the Sydney Morning Herald about his counterpart.
"But it's one of those really good challenges. The wicket's going to turn here at some point, whether day one, day three or day four, and he is going to be in the game and bowl a lot of overs. It's all about figuring out how I'm going to play against him, how I'm going to score runs against him, and what he might do. If you bat a long time against him, he’s going to change his game plans against you. He's not the kind of guy who'll do the same thing over and over, he's going to try to work you out," he added.
Given their ineptitude to win the series in India, Khawaja knows the challenge that faces his teammates, but given their current form, the batter is confident about ending his team's drought.
"There's definitely a different feel. There are no guarantees in this game, but at least there's a bit more maturity, particularly in the batting and more maturity in the bowling. We've learnt a lot over the last 10 years, particularly the types of wickets we can get and how we think we can perform and go out and win Test matches out here. It feels like we are in a better spot than before, but it’s always going to be tough,"
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