MUMBAI: Almost 14 months after he last played for India, in the 2023 ODI World Cup final against Australia at Ahmedabad on November 19 before he was sidelined due to an ankle injury which needed surgery and then suffered from swelling in his knees, veteran pacer Mohammed Shami is finally back.
The 34-year-old fast bowler, who was out of the Indian team for a long time due to a knee injury, was on Saturday recalled for the five-match T20I series at home against England, which will start from January 22 at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata.
The other big development that emerged from the meeting of the Ajit Agarkar-headed national selection committee at a five-star hotel here to pick the team for the T20Is, which was also attended by India’s T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav, was the appointment of left-arm spinning allrounder Axar Patel as the vice-captain of the side, and the exclusion of star wicketkeeper-batter Rishabh Pant from this team, with the in-form Sanju Samson being preferred, along with Dhruv Jurel.
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This is the first time that Axar has been elevated to the position of vice-captaincy of the Indian team in any format, and the Gujarat bowler seems to have been rewarded for his fine all-round show in India’s triumphant campaign in the T20 World Cup in June June last year.
The other big name to miss out from India’s T20I squad is opener Shubman Gill, though a source insisted to TOI that “Pant and Gill have been rested from this series to allow them to recover fully after a gruelling five-Test Border-Gavaskar series in Australia.”
During the T20I series against South Africa in November last year, Samson had become the first Indian cricketer to score back-to-back centuries in T20 Internationals when he scored 107 runs off 50 balls, with seven fours and ten sixes, following up on his 40-ball hundred against Bangladesh.
“It was impossible to exclude Sanju when he’s been in this blazing form,” a source in the BCCI told TOI. For all his incredible talent and the ability to tear apart an attack, Pant’s white-ball returns have nowhere ben similar to his massive achievements in Test cricket. In 76 T20Is, all the Delhi man has managed is 1209 runs@23.25, with three fifties.
Incidentally, both Pant, who was bought for a massive Rs 27 cr in the IPL auction in Jeddah in November last year (he became the most expensive player ever in IPL history) by Lucknow Super Giants, and the in-form Shreyas Iyer (purchased for Rs 26.75 cr in the same auction) failed to find a spot in India’s team for the T20I series against England!
Bumrah, Siraj rested
With fears around ace pacer Jasprit Bumrah’s injury being serious, it’s now almost certain that Shami will also be picked for the three-match ODI series against England, and the ICC Champions Trophy after that, in what will be a huge boost to India’s pace attack, since Bumrah is set to be rested from the ODI series too.
As expected, Bumrah, who suffered a back injury during the fifth and final Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy at Sydney due to his heavy workload, and his fellow fast bowler Siraj, who too played in all the Tests of the series, have been given a break from the T20I series, while express pacer Mayank Yadav is out due to a back injury which caused him to miss the T20I series against South Africa last year too.
Even as Bumrah fired all cylinders, India felt Shami’s absence heavily in the recently-concluded Border-Gavaskar Trophy, which they lost 3-1. For the past couple of months, there was some drama and lack of clarity around Shami’s fitness status. During the BGT, Indian captain Rohit Sharma had urged the BCCI’s National Cricket Academy to issue a statement to give clarity on Shami’s fitness status.
A BCCI release on December 23 had stated: “Based on the current medical assessment, the BCCI medical team has determined that his knee requires more time for controlled exposure to bowling loads. Consequently, he has not been deemed fit for consideration for the remaining two Tests of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.”
However, since his return from injury, Shami has been bowling consistently across formats for Bengal in domestic cricket -he played a match in the Ranji Trophy, and then in the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy, and then took five wickets in three matches in the Vijay Hazare Trophy.
All-rounder Riyan Parag is not a part of the squad due to injury, while allrounder Nitish Kumar Reddy, who was India’s find of the series in Australia, scoring a memorable maiden ton at the MCG, has been picked ahead of Ramandeep Singh, who was a part of the Indian T20 team in South Africa last year. Spinners Washington Sundar and Varun Chakravarthy are a part of the side.
India squad for England T20Is
Suryakumar Yadav (C), Sanju Samson (wk), Abhishek Sharma, Tilak Varma, Hardik Pandya, Rinku Singh, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Axar Patel (vc), Harshit Rana, Arshdeep Singh, Mohammad Shami, Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi, Washington Sundar, Dhruv Jurel (wk).
Team for ODIs & CT25 to be declared later
The selectors have only picked the Indian T20 side as of now, while the selection of the three-match ODI series against England-the ODIs are supposed to be played on Feb 6, 9 & 12- and the provisional squad for the ICC Champions Trophy in Dubai and Pakistan will be done later.
TOI understands that as per the ICC rule, all the teams are supposed to submit their provisional squads by 23.59 pm on Jan 12, but the BCCI is likely to ask for an extension in that regard. Normally, all the teams are supposed to submit their provisional squads a month in advance, but this time the ICC has stretched that period to five weeks. Of course, the teams are allowed to change their squads later.
The Champions Trophy starts in Pakistan-UAE from February 19.
Punjab and Punjab Kings’ left-arm pacer Arshdeep Singh and mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy will spearhead the bowling attack in the T20Is, with explosive batsman Suryakumar Yadav leading the side.
Allrounder Nitish Kumar Reddy, who performed well in the Border-Gavaskar series in Australia recently, scoring 298 runs @37.25 in five Tests including a century at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground in the fourth Test, has been included in the T20I squad, and so has been off-spinning allrounder Washington Sundar and prolific opener Yashasvi Jaiswal (top run-getter in the 2024-25 BGT with 391 runs@43.44 in five Tests).
