Aakash Chopra Presents His 30 Members Indian Squad For Upcoming Australian Tour
Former Indian cricketer Aakash Chopra has put forward his squad of 30 players for India’s upcoming tour of Australia with no unexpected inclusions or exclusions. Aakash Chopra is currently Indian cricket commentator and he has played for the Indian cricket team from late 2003 until late 2004 as a defensive opening batsman and close catcher in Test matches.
The former player has included the 24 among the 30 players to play across all the formats, whereas the rest has been restricted to the white ball cricket alone. The former captain M S Dhoni has been excluded from the list as expected.
Four openers have found their place in this squad including Rohit Sharma, K L Rahul, Mayank Agarwal and Prithvi Shaw. With some consistent performances in the opening slot, it seems that Rohit Sharma has cemented his place in the opening slot and a fierce competition is expected between the other three to fill up the next available slot. The recent performances of Prithvi Shaw in the domestic circuit makes the competition even more interesting.
The recently consistent middle order has the usual names, with only Pujara and Kohli ensuring their respective slots in the first eleven. Even though the squad consists of 30 members, the former cricketer has gone with only two keepers, Rishabh Pant and Wriddhiman Saha. This is understandable since there is K L Rahul in the squad as an option for the same.
The spinners squad includes Ashwin, Jadeja, Kuldeep and Chahal, across all the formats. In the Australian conditions, playing more than a spinner seems practical only in a couple of matches, at the most. The final inclusion of these players largely depend on the pitch conditions and respective venues, rather than their recent forms.
The pace attack includes 8 members, since the tour is a long drawn one and the possibility of injuries has been kept in mind. With all the pacers performing impressively across the last season, apart from Bumrah, nobody can be assured of their place in the first eleven. The difference between the earlier Indian squads to the Australia and this one is the strength of its pace unit. A triumph of this squad can be ensured only with a right combination of lethality and accuracy of this squad. Thus this series turns out to be a measurement stick to all the so called improvement made by this pace attack in recent times.
It is also to be noted that Shikhar Dhawan have only been included in the white squad and the former player expects no return of the veteran to the red ball squad in the near future. Along with him, Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Shardul Thakur, Krunal Pandya and Rahul Chahar have also been considered only for the white ball cricket.
The COVID 19 pandemic has provided the experts and analysts an opportunity to present their respective jumbo squads of 30 for the upcoming Australian tour. But this provides a difficult scenario too since such a broad and vague team do not help us to understand the internal dynamics and overall expected balance for Team India for this upcoming tour.
The team put forward by Aakash Chopra is as follows:
Openers
Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Prithvi Shaw
Middle-order
Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Hanuma Vihari, Shubman Gill
Wicketkeepers
Wriddhiman Saha, Rishabh Pant
Spinners
Ravi Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal
Fast bowlers
Jasprit Bumrah, Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav, Mohammed Shami, Navdeep Saini, Bhuvneshwar
Kumar, Deepak Chahar, Hardik Pandya
White-ball players
Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Shardul Thakur, Shikhar Dhawan, Krunal Pandya, Rahul Chahar
https://www.instagram.com/p/CDFxw6Jgzw8/
