Against India, South Africa will prepare for the worst and hope for the best

I think it would have been fitting to have had a third Test against Pakistan. I know we are going to have the same argument again about whether more Tests should be played and all that. However, it would have been nice to have had a series decider, because you now see a South Africa Test team close to our best, and you would've wanted to give Pakistan another opportunity to rectify their wrongs.

After the drawn Test series against Pakistan, we have another two-Test series in the subcontinent coming up against India from mid-November. That series will probably be a bit more challenging than Pakistan, and it will be important for us that we start the preparation now and not when we get to India.

From a personal point of view, my preparation will come in the form of playing for the South Africa A side against India A. I will play in the second four-day match as part of my return-to-play programme. I'm looking forward to it, though I will have to find my South Africa A training kit because I haven't used it since 2017! I welcome any match practice and am looking forward to being out there again. I have seen the squad India A have picked, so it will be competitive and more than just a practice game.

When I talk about preparation, I'm not necessarily speaking about our batters and bowlers getting into the nets, but more from a mental point of view. It comes down to understanding the challenges that we are going to face in Kolkata and Guwahati, and subsequently it's how we are going to go about dealing with them.

After losing the first Test to Pakistan in Lahore, we came back strongly in the second Test in Rawalpindi to win on day four. I think in the grander scheme of things, we probably suffered one of our normal issues of starting slowly in the Test series. If we had played in the first Test like we did in the second, who knows what the end result would have been in terms of the overall series.

I think I have to be careful because I'm speaking from the outside here, but the wickets in Pakistan's Test series against England last year looked a lot more spinner-friendly and a lot more deteriorated. I think these ones in our series were your natural subcontinental ones, where in the first innings guys could bat. The track in Rawalpindi looked a bit slow, so the scoring rates weren't as quick, but guys looked like they could trust their defences. Even in the first Test, it looked like you could trust your defence and kind of build your game around what the conditions were offering.

When it comes to India, we hope that the wickets are on the good side. When I say "good side", it's about batters being able to get in in the first innings and set out their stall. Then, in the second innings, the spinners will come into the game.

To be honest, I don't see India being any different in terms of the wickets they will prepare. If you look at the series between India and New Zealand, which the latter won, conditions were a bit spinner-friendly so I guess you always want to prepare for the worst, especially as batters. The mantra we subscribe to as a team is to "prepare for the worst and hope for the best". It's about how we counter tactics in extreme conditions and come up on the right side of the result.

In our shared Test series against Pakistan I think the playing conditions were fair, but naturally the spinners were the main threat and they took the most wickets. In fact, South Africa's spinners took 35 of the 40 wickets on offer in the series, which set a new record for the team in a two-Test series. However, I do think there was something in there for the batters, evidenced by the century scored by Tony de Zorzi in the first Test. It was also underlined by the way in which Ricky [Ryan Rickleton] got in in the second innings. As well as a guy like Stubbo [Tristan Stubbs] who scored 76 in the first innings, and even Dewald Brevis. In terms of Brev, he's a little bit different because of the way he plays. He can kind of make a bad wicket a good one because that is the talent of the boy.

In terms of our stand-in Test captain and opening batter, Aiden Markram, he didn't go on to get big scores across the series, but the way he goes about his batting, he sets a good foundation and platform for the other players to follow. He plays off the front foot and is always looking to take it on. We feed off it as batters when guys at the top play with so much freedom and confidence.