Chennai: The Indian team, bound for Sri lanka for the One-day series, assembled here on Sunday. Starting late afternoon, they had a four hours nets session under the MA Chidambaram Stadium lights - a far cry from the occasion in July last, when they had trained under the blazing Chennai sun.
Coach Gary Kirsten over saw the session with players practising in two different groups. The first batch, consisting of skipper MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Rohit Sharma, Munaf Patel, Gautam Gambhir and Pragyan Ojha trained with bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad, fielding coach Robin Singh and mental conditioning trainer Paddy Upton in attendance.
Virender Sehwag, Pathan Brothers (Irfan and Yousuf), Ishant Sharma, Zaheer Khan, Yuvraj Singh, Ravindra Jadeja, Praveen Kumar and Suresh Raina took the second session. They players underwent various fielding drills.
Prasad had marked out the good length spot with and red and black tape his pace quartet. Zaheer, Munaf, Ishant and Irfan obliged by pitching the bal at the right areas. Big hitting guys like Sehwag, Sachin, Yuvraj and Dhoni looked in great touch as they cleared the boundary with ease.
Gambhir, Yusuf and Rohit seemed raring to go for the five-match series, with a prolonged batting session. Gauti was the first batsman to get into the nets with some local bowlers while Sachin faced Irfan, Ojha and Munaf on the main pitch. After a while they swapped positions.
The Indians team will have another practice session on Monday morning before leaving for Sri Lanka in the afternoon.
Sri Lanka have on the road now for six weeks, first in Bangladesh and last week in Pakistan and only have two days prepare for another really tough series with India. However, after Saturday night's great victory in Lahore, they could not be in a better frame of mind.
India and never played Twenty20 game, while total ODI played 106, India won 55 and Srilanka won 41, another 10 ended without any result.