Four-bowler strategy 'highly unlikely' - Kohli

Virat Kohli will turn 27 on Thursday, will play in his 38th Test, and will lead the side for the first time in a home Test. Just like his predecessor, he jokes captaincy has given him 40 grey hair in the beard. The cricket that he promises, though, is free of grey areas. A day after Ravi Shastri said the side was not averse to playing six specialist batsmen if convinced four bowlers could do the job, Kohli insisted this was not the time to do so. There was another school of thought that India might possibly not take a big risk in the first Test of a big series against a side that has seam bowlers with menacing repute, but that's the last message Kohli wants send out.

Shastri had said if the weather was cool, which it is in Mohali, and the pitch bowler-friendly enough, India could go with just the four specialist bowlers. Kohli either doesn't feel the pitch is ideal or doesn't want to send the message of a backward step, but he has said playing fewer than five bowlers is highly unlikely. He did say, though, that if there was a rare chance of playing four bowlers, three spinners would still be in.

"See in such conditions, if you go with four bowlers then obviously that combination [three spinners] works," Kohli said when asked if these were the conditions that could allow him to play six batsmen and three spinners. "So depends on what kind of combination we want to go with. I can't disclose that right now. That's certainly something that we can keep in mind but it's highly unlikely. You expect your best batsmen to take responsibility and do the bulk of the scoring. I would rather have an extra bowler, ready to give me 10 to 15 extra overs than someone getting tired and not being able to take wickets at important times. I think we need to find the right balance between batsmen taking responsibility and bowlers taking wickets at important times."

Playing five bowlers will mean a difficult choice between Rohit Sharma and Cheteshwar Pujara, but it is not about the batting, Kohli said. Not many Indian captains - India has been historically batting-oriented - can claim to have said this in the open, but Kohli said the best the batsmen were going to do was draw games. And that he wanted wins. "If we have six batsmen and one wicketkeeper then we can score 500 runs, but if we are a bowler short then more often than not there will come a session when you will give away too many runs and will not get a wicket," Kohli said. "So I think the top-five batsmen should take more responsibility of scoring runs. The current batsmen love the challenge."

Every thing about Kohli spoke intent, although a bit of victim mentality came through when speaking of pitches. He feels there is more criticism of India's turning tracks than the seaming tracks abroad, which is a subjective call, but even Hashim Amla, the opposition captain, sees no foulplay with a home team enjoying the conditions advantage.

About his own batting, Kohli said he didn't just want to score runs but score them at a pace that gave them time to force results. "Well the idea is to get as many runs as I can, obviously," Kohli said. "But the pace at which I get those runs is also very important if you want to win Test matches. I understand my role in the middle order. I will try and assess the situation accordingly. Basically not do anything much different from what I've done before. This is a quality bowling attack. We are very excited about the challenge, and so am I. I love to be out there in the middle, into the action."

Kohli has promised a calmer self, not because of his criticism for aggressive posturing but out of necessity. "There has been a lot of criticism about a lot of things in my life," Kohli said. "I don't care about these things. Eventually people can write and say what they want to, it's their freedom of expression, but when I step on to the field I give my 120% every time. And I don't need to prove that to anyone else.

"The only thing that has changed is that I have 40 grey hair in my beard since I have become Test captain. I am the same person that started playing for India, obviously you do make mistakes and you learn from them along the way. It's not that I find those things very wrong, but I thought I wasting my energies on being too expressive on the field at times, which I have started to conserve and use it in better places. You only get smarter with age and the amount of game you play at the highest level. That I think has happened to me as well. That is not something very unnatural. I have not changed in a big way."