Hyderabad: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday said that the national selectors should explain to the cricket-loving public why wicket-keeper batter Sanju Samson was dropped from the Indian team, which will play the five-match T20 series against Australia.
The series will begin on Thursday at Visakhapatnam while the last game of the series will be played at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on December 3. All the games will start at 7 PM.
The Indian selector led by former India pacer Ajit Agarkar selected the side for the bilateral series. The side to be led by Suryakumar Yadav was announced by the BCCI on Monday night through a press release.
Tharoor also questioned the exclusion of spinner Yuzvendra Chahal from the national squad, which will take on Australia.
Tharoor in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, said, "This is truly inexplicable. @IamSanjuSamson should have not just been selected, he should have led the side in the absence of all the seniors. His captaincy experience with Kerala and @rajasthanroyals is more current than SKY's. Our selectors need to explain themselves to the cricket-loving public. And why no @yuzi_chahal either? (sic)."
After a draining campaign in the recent ODI World Cup, India expectedly did not pick many senior players including regular skipper Rohit Sharma, star batter Virat Kohki in the 15-member squad, with only Suryakumar Yadav, pacer Prasidh Krishna and wicketkeeper batter Ishan Kishan crossing over for the T20Is.
The selectors felt that these three players have not played enough cricket to warrant workload management at this moment. Middle-order battter Shreyas Iyer, who was part of the Indian team for the recently concluded ICC Cricket World Cup 2023, will join the team for the last two matches at Raipur and Bengaluru and he will take over the vice-captain's role from Ruturaj Gaikwad.
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