Kohli 'agreeable' to playing day-night Test cricket

India are seemingly moving closer to playing day-night Test cricket for the first time, with new BCCI president Sourav Ganguly dismissing suggestions that captain Virat Kohli is opposed to the concept.

India and Bangladesh are the only senior Test nations yet to play a five-day game with a pink ball, and the Indians declined to play last summer's Adelaide Test against Australia under lights.

Ganguly has long been an advocate of day-night Tests and having spoken with Kohli in Mumbai this week, the newly-installed BCCI president said the captain of the world's leading Test side is open to playing under lights.

"Kohli is agreeable to it," Ganguly said. "I see a lot of reports in newspapers that he is not, but that is not true.

"The game needs to go forward and that is the way forward. People should finish work and come to watch champions play. I don't know when that will happen, but it will."

The Adelaide Oval was the venue for the first-ever day-night Test in 2015 and also hosted pink-ball cricket in 2016 and 2017, but India declined to play under lights on their tour of Australia last summer.

India will tour Australia again for four Tests next season, but the venues for those matches – and whether or not any of them will be played under lights – is yet to be determined.

Ganguly says he is "a big believer in day-night Tests” and has long pushed the world's biggest cricketing nation to embrace the concept.

But apart from brief flirtations with first-class cricket under lights at domestic level, India have opted to stick with the traditional red-ball game.

The onus remains on individual nations to host and agree to playing Tests under lights and Ganguly is passionately in favour.

"Cricket needs a change," he says. "Who had thought that T20 cricket will be such a rage when it was first played?

"Even we (senior players) were asked to rest when the format was first played. See, lifestyles have changed. No one can afford to bunk schools or offices these days to watch cricket. They need to be brought to the ground after day's work."

Australia have played five day-night Test matches (winning all five) and will play two more this summer, against Pakistan in Adelaide and another against New Zealand in Perth.

However, there are no other day-night Tests currently on the international schedule.

In August, Cricket Australia's Head of Cricket Operations Peter Roach conceded he was surprised by the lack of interest in the concept around the world, but said CA would continue to push for it.

"There are few other countries who have expressed the same desire we have to play them," he said.

"If you asked back when we played the first one, (assuming) it was as successful as we would have hoped, would it catch on around the world? You probably would have thought it would have.

"It certainly works here, we know that. Regardless of what others are doing, we know the day-night concept works really well in Australia.

"(The lack of interest) is disappointing, and it makes our job harder to have teams agree to playing them over here, because it's a bit more foreign to them."