Quotes from Ravi Shastri

My batting took some time to develop - I was batting at No. 10 initially but my bowling took off.

Take up a challenge and treat it as an opportunity. Once you do that and succeed, all you want in life is more such opportunities.

I was a very determined cricketer. I treated the opening position as a challenge. Big names and tough attacks brought the best out of me.

Life is much like batting, treating every ball on merit.

How do you pick players? When they are good, and Dhoni is the best limited-overs keeper in the country.

As far as I am concerned, I have never seen any Indian batsman perform better than Virat on Australian soil keeping Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman in mind as they have done exceptionally well.

The beauty of Test cricket is all about playing an opponent in their backyard or defending home turf under challenging conditions over five days - dominating each session, dominating each day, picking 20 wickets to win a contest. That's historically been cricket's most fascinating gift.

It's important to have the right mix of experience and youth.

Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni, the respect they have for each other is unbelievable, so it makes my job in the dressing room so much easier.

The classical art of spin bowling, how you should bowl in Test match cricket, is disappearing.

Sometimes when you are playing non-stop international cricket in all formats - which was the case with Jadeja - you do well one day, get hammered the next, and immediately the spotlight is on you. That eats into you.

I have little patience or time for nonsense that's spread around.

The coach and support staff's role is to get the players in the most brilliant frame of mind to execute things and if done effectively, it brings enjoyment to the player's game.

As long as we know the job we are doing and we are honest to our jobs, as long as support staff we are helping players channelise their energies in the right direction, we are not worried about what critics say.

I am more into fine-tuning, mindsets, and how you play the game. Very rarely will I go and tinker with a player unless I think it is needed.

The job satisfaction that an opener gets no other batsman gets.

Opening is about the mindset. You got to respect the new ball.

Opening for the first time in Test cricket, I scored 128 against the likes of Sarfraz Nawaz and Imran Khan.

In a side when you have 15 players there will always be times when there will be opinions that will be different. That is what is needed.

I don't want everyone toeing the same line. You have got to have discussions and someone might then think of a fresh strategy, which has to be encouraged.

Sometimes it might be the junior-most player in the team who may come up with a strategy which we hadn't even thought of and we need to bring that to the table.

When you are playing a Test match, you would like to be playing with your strongest side.

My job is to do exactly that with every player - to put him in a frame of mind where he is thinking only about his role and he is thinking about the team he is playing for and, of course, the opposition which we always respect.

If we are confident of what we can do, then all opposition simply has to be treated as a whole.