World Test Championship biggest, most important ICC tournament: Virat Kohli

India captain Virat Kohli on Wednesday rated the World Test Championship as the biggest among all the ICC events in the wake of revelations that the game's governing body is planning to have more flagship white-ball tournaments during the next eight-year cycle from 2023-2031.

"I think World Test Championship as an ICC tournament should be right up there. All the other tournaments for me they start under that. This is probably the biggest of them all as every team wants to make it to the final at the Lord's. We are no different. "We are in that zone. We want to make sure that we qualify as soon as we can and be in that frame of mind to hopefully win that (championship)," said the Indian skipper ahead of first Test against New Zealand from Friday.

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Kohli on how WTC has changed the dimension of Test cricket 

The Indian skipper said that the introduction of the World Test Championship has made the game's longest format more exciting and that is something that he and his boys have experienced even though they have not played too many matches overseas. Speaking about playing overseas, Kohli mentioned that so far they have only played a couple of games in the West Indies and have not toured Australia as a part of the Test Championship before saying that this is their first away tour since the start of the home season,

'Games will be intense': Virat Kohli

'Captain Fearless' added that the Test matches will be intense and all teams will go for wins instead of trying to settle for draws which is just what is the need of the hour in the longest format of the game.

"Games will be intense and teams will go for wins rather than settling for draws which is what we need to see in Test cricket. The South Africa versus England series was very exciting. England won the Cape Town Test in the final hour and you will see lot more results like that because there are a lot more points in line," he added. 

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(With PTI Inputs)