England will arrive in India just three days prior to the five-match Test series.
With this style, the Three Lions have produced impressive results under the regime of Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum over the last two seasons.
The tour of India will pose the next biggest challenge to England. While the tour is slated to get underway on January 25 with the first Test in Hyderabad, the Stokes-led side will reportedly arrive in India just three days prior to the five-match series.
According to a report published in The Daily Mail UK, England will spend nine days in the world-class facilities of Abu Dhabi which will give them everything they need to acclimatize to the Indian conditions.
“The facilities are ridiculously good,” former England spinner Graeme Swann was quoted as saying by the leading UK daily.
“In that part of the world, they can give you what you want on request. If I said to the groundsman, ‘I’d like a day-nine Test pitch in India’, he was more than happy for me to go out there with my spikes on and create what England may well face.
“It’s brilliant. The way you’re able to prepare there is second to none and I wish we had it back in my day. We could never do the sort of training they do now. I wouldn’t accept at all that England will be under-done when they get to Hyderabad. They will arrive there ready to play in the first Test far more than if they had a tin-pot warm-up game in India,” he added.
The report also claimed that the facility in Abu Dhabi has 65 pitches across four grounds and 22 outdoor turf nets where England players can prepare themselves for every challenge that India will throw at them.
“We don’t have specifics in terms of clay but all the wickets do have different behavioural results and then it’s up to England to decide what they best require. We’ve got a team of 20 ground staff who have been with us for the last six to seven years and good international expertise among our management,” said Matthew Boucher, the English CEO of Abu Dhabi Cricket.
“We talk to England and all our clients regularly to see how best we can provide the optimal surfaces and multi-sport offerings for their strength and conditioning teams. We hope to build on this. We have a good relationship with Afghanistan, for one, and we’re talking to other boards about camps and age-group cricket and that’s a big part of our future. Importantly, it’s a community facility now as well, as much as anything,” he further remarked.