The former cricketing swinger and pacer, Irfan Pathan leaves out the big star Rishabh Pant from his list of playing XI for India. He rather chose Dinesh Karthik over him who’s fantastic performance in the IPL as well as the series against the proteas proving his mettle once again. If you have close look up on the 5 match t20I series played between the two teams recently you’ll find the names of Hardik and Dinesh as the most common due to their responsible innings throughout.
In the 5 -match t20i series against the proteas, Dinesh Karthik was seen playing an important innings in especially in the 4th match where he scored a half century (55 off 27 deliveries) whereas Hardik scored 43 off 31 deliveries assisting team Indian in their crucial hours to win and settle the scores.
Probably, this would have been the reason why Irfan Pathan would have preferred selecting Dinesh Karthik’s name over the skipper Rishabh Pant. According to Pathan, Rishabh is yet to prove his mettle in the shortest format and is the only weakest link not supporting him.
Irfan believes that for the T20 world cup team India needs stronger and experienced players to sustain the bouncy and swingy wickets of the Australian pitches and for doing do so he feels adding names of Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul could be a way out and the given analysis is based on Virat Kohli’s past experiences in Australia.
“In Australia, you need strong starts as the ball swings and seams. You require a player who has experience. Kohli may not have performed well so far but in Australia, he has scored a lot of runs,”
But our analysis is quite the contrary to what the ex. cricketer feels. When Irfan points out the pitch of Australia needing experienced batsmen like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul, he should have thought that the problem with Virat Kohli and others mentioned isn’t the experience at all but the form through which these cricketers are going through. If the form is bad, then whatever the cricketer does will go in vain, so forget about pitches and the experience needed.
Coming back to the list of Irfan’s playing XI squad for India in the T20 world cup there is one more player that the cricketer feels to brushing is none other than, Shreyas Iyer, who since last concluded IPL has been struggling with his batting against the bounce and the pace. Irfan said,
“Apart from these couple of games, he has done well, be it the series against Sri Lanka or West Indies before the IPL. So yes, he is making his case very strong. He performed really well, he is just coming hard against the bowlers from the word go and that’s the kind of character you need as well when you want someone to bat higher up the order,”
So, considering all to what Irfan Pathan has proposed, the playing XI according to him for the T20I world in Australia should be;
- Rohit Sharma
- KL Rahul
- Virat Kohli
- Hardik Pandya
- Suryakumar Yadav
- Ravindra Jadeja
- Dinesh Karthik
- Harshal Patel
- Yuzvendra Chahal, and
- Jasprit Bumrah
- Bhuveneshwar Kumar
If asked, the top line names could have been more better having players like Sanju Samson, the youngster Ayush Badoni, who displayed his mettle extremely well in the initial few matches, Rahul Tewatia, Mohammed Shami, Umran Malik to suggest a few.
