Live Score
Cricket Teams
Cricket Players'Take it to them': New Zealand looking to challenge India's Test dominance at home with ‘no fear’ approach
Tom Latham, who took over as New Zealand captain from Tim Southee, has said they would be looking to take the attack to the Indians and play with freedom.
India round off their home Test season this year with three matches against New Zealand. The Kiwis come into the series on the back of a 2-0 drubbing in Sri Lanka and they now face the daunting task of challenging an Indian team who have not lost a Test series at home in well over a decade.
New Zealand generally don't have a good record in India, winning just two out of the 36 Tests they have played over the years in the country. While New Zealand did beat India to win the inaugural World Test Championship title in 2019, the Kiwis have hardly ever come close to victory in the country itself. Tom Latham, who took over as captain of the BlackCaps from Tim Southee earlier this month, has said they would be looking to take the attack to the Indians and play with freedom.
"From my point of view it's about trying to continue doing the good stuff we've been doing," Latham said. "It's an exciting challenge going over to India and once we can go over there hopefully [we can] play with a bit of freedom, bit of no fear and try and take it to them. If we do that hopefully gives ourselves a good chance.
India recently took their winning streak at home to 18 series. They veered away from the usual spin-friendly pitches against Bangladesh. In the second Test in particular, they forced out a result in their favour despite more than two days being washed out. India broke records for the fastest 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 in their breakneck first innings, setting a score of 285/9 in just 34.4 overs in reply to Bangladesh's 233 all out. They went on to win the match by seven wickets.
‘We’ve seen teams do well in India'
The only teams who have managed to record Test victories in India since 2014 are Australia and England. Latham said that New Zealand will be following their example of trying to
"Think in India we've seen teams that have done well out there in the past have been quite aggressive towards them, especially with the bat they've looked to play a few shots, but also put them under pressure which is really important over there rather than sitting and waiting for something to happen. We'll decide on how we want to play when we get over there, but guys have got plans around how they like to approach things and hopefully we can fine tune those."
