Brownlie to work on batting skills in India

New Zealand batsman Dean Brownlie will travel to India in October, to work on his batting in spinner-friendly conditions. Brownlie, who was dropped from the New Zealand squad after a poor tour of the Caribbean, said he had been looking to take up such a training stint for 'a couple of years'.

"I've wanted this for quite a while," Brownlie told Fairfax NZ News. "I've been pushing for this for a couple of years, because I didn't want to waste a tour - I suppose, like I did [against West Indies] - working out my best way to play in those conditions. But the cricket has been so full on and so busy, so it's been hard to get the time to do it."

Brownlie will train at a Mumbai academy for five days, before heading to Pune to play in a few local matches. He will leave for India soon after the completion of New Zealand A's home series against India A, which runs from September 18 to October 6.

In the Caribbean, Brownlie had been dismissed on five occasions out of nine (including the tour game against WICB President's XI) by the spinners, and got into double digits only twice on the tour, with a highest of 35.

More than the technical aspects of his game, though, it is the mental side of it that needed some working on, Brownlie said. "It's not so much about making big changes," he said. "I need to learn to trust my game a little bit more. I realise it shouldn't have taken six weeks on tour [in the West Indies] to realise what I was doing wrong, but it did.

"I think I can play spin well, but I do need to work on how I play it in those [slow, low] conditions."