After long uncertainty around the availability of key players, the national selection committee announced the team for the last three Tests against England. Virat Kohli continues to make himself unavailable due to personal reasons while K L Rahul will miss the third test in Rajkot as he was not fully recovered from the injury. The availability of Ravindra Jadeja will be monitored once the team assembles in Rajkot.
The biggest call has been to leave out Shreyas Iyer. While there are reports that Iyer has complained of back stiffness, it is learnt that the team management and the selection committee were considering looking beyond him.
“Kohli had conveyed to the board well in advance that he planned to take a break from mid-Feb. BCCI and the selectors had checked with him if could manage to play in the series but he said that he needed to be with his family,” a BCCI source said.
Following the non-availability of Rahul, the national selectors replaced him with the in-form Devdutt Padikkal, who received his maiden Test call-up in the squad for the third Test. Rahul had been named as part of the squad for the last three Tests subject to fitness. “Padikkal has replaced Rahul only for the third Test. We are still confident that Rahul will return later in this series,” a source said.
Padikkal, who had emerged as a white-ball opening option a few years back, now bats at No 3 in First-Class cricket for Karnataka. The left-hander has been in good form in First-Class cricket this season. A few days back, the 23-year-old Karnataka batter slammed 151 against Tamil Nadu in the Ranji Trophy - his third hundred in the tournament this season.
Squad for 3rd Test: Rohit Sharma (C), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill, Sarfaraz Khan, Rajat Patidar, Ravindra Jadeja, KS Bharat (wk), Dhruv Jurel (wk), Axar Patel, R Ashwin, Kuldeep Yadav, Washington Sundar, Jasprit Bumrah (VC), Mohammed Siraj, Mukesh Kumar, Akash Deep, Devdutt Padikkal.
