Seniors seek Deodhar route to India selection

NEW DELHI: All eyes will be on Prithvi Shaw but seniors like Ajinkya Rahane and R Ashwin will aim to remain relevant in the one-day format when the rejigged Deodhar Trophy starts here with India A facing India B at the Kotla on Tuesday. For the younger crop, it will be an opportunity to stake claim for the A tour to New Zealand, next month.

While his bowling partner in Tests, Ravindra Jadeja, has managed to make an ODI comeback, Ashwin has not played a limited overs game for India since July 2017.

His captain in the India A team, Dinesh Karthik, faces a similar test after being dropped for the West Indies series.

India A also includes Shaw and Karun Nair, who would like to make a strong case after being ignored in England. Test vicecaptain Rahane, who has not played an ODI since February, too will have to do something sensational for selectors to take notice. He was a potential candidate for number four position where Ambati Rayudu is being preferred at the moment. There is no doubting the fact that Yuzvendra Chahal is a gifted legspinner. He has the guile, the flight, the leg spin, the variations, and the chess player’s brains to bring it all together and outwit the batsman. In short, he should be the ideal bowler to add to India’s already talented bowling mix and provide competition to R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja in the Test team. And yet, he is not even spoken of as a contender whenever the team selection debate takes off.

So what does the future hold for Chahal?

Ashwin and Jadeja’s succession planning is crucial. Kuldeep Yadav and Chahal should ideally be the future duo that India depend. With a crucial Test series coming up Down Under, this future is perhaps closer than it has ever been.

Australian wickets are hard and bouncy and other than Nathan Lyon, most home grown tweakers from Clarrie Grimmett to Shane Warne who have done well there, have been wrist spinners. It is worth recalling that among Indian spinners, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar took 28 wickets in his only full series in Australia and Anil Kumble picked up 44 wickets in his last two sorties Down Under.

With two high class wrist spinners in Chahal and Kuldeep, India would do well to depend less on the finger spin of Jadeja and Ashwin this Australian summer and use the opportunity that the tour provides to lay the foundations for the future of Indian spin, a future that rests on the wrists of two very talented young men.

So what exactly is going on here?

Chahal made his ODI debut in June 2016 and in the two years since, he has played 25 matches picking up 45 wickets at 22.96 apiece. His partner-in-crime Kuldeep Yadav earned his call

up a year later and has played 29 matches picking up 58 wickets at 20.10.

In 26 T20IS over the past two years, Chahal has bagged 42 wickets at 18.98 apiece. Kuldeep, in a bit more than a year, has picked up 24 wickets at a cost of 13.2 runs each.

Together, they have formed a wrist-spin duo that few whiteball teams can boast of. Kuldeep has graduated to Test cricket, but Chahal is not a contender in an environment where many of the current Indian Test players have come up through the whiteball cricket route and achieved success with the red-ball.

One standard response is that Chahal doesn’t play first-class cricket and has not proven that he can bowl long spells.

Chahal made his first-class debut for Haryana in 2009. He was 19 and had given up a career