India take first steps towards new era with bold decisions for West Indies tour

Team India took some bold decisions when announcing the squads for the Tests and ODIs in the upcoming tour of West Indies, dropping Cheteshwar Pujara and Umesh Yadav while drafting youngsters such as Yashasvi Jaiswal and Ruturaj Gaikwad into the red-ball format.

The Indian team leadership had for long been accused of being conservative in terms of team selection, which has often resulted in some of the senior members of the team becoming walking wickets or being reduced to mere bowling machines.

The decision to look beyond Pujara and Umesh and draft youngsters such as Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ruturaj Gaikwad and Mukesh Choudhary, however, suggests the Team India certainly do have eyes on the future and that they’ve set wheels in motion as far as its transition is concerned.

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A new No 3 after ages

Pujara getting overlooked for the tour of West Indies marks the end of another glorious chapter in Indian cricket. With the Saurashtra batter likely having made his final appearance for India in the WTC final, India will have a new candidate for the number three slot in the batting order.

If Pujara’s international career truly has come to an end, he leaves behind massive shoes to fill for the likes of Jaiswal and Gaikwad. It was no easy task for Pujara either to succeed Indian batting legend and current head coach Dravid in the No 3 position back in 2012, two years after he made his India debut.

ChePu, though, managed to not only fill the void but carve his own legacy over the next decade at that slot. Dravid and Pujara are two of the most prolific run-scorers at the No 3 position in Tests for India, and occupy the second and sixth positions respectively when taking batters from other teams across cricketing history into account.

Coach Dravid though, knows a thing or two about encouraging youngsters and bringing the best out of them, and should be able to guide Jaiswal, Gaikwad or even someone like Shubman Gill — another candidate for the slot — into adjusting to the rigours of that role.

Jaiswal, Gaikwad and Gill are also known to play an attacking brand of cricket when necessary, and might just infuse a revolutionary change in India’s approach towards batting in Tests, much like England did in the ‘Bazball’ Era.

Meanwhile, senior batter Ajinkya Rahane appears to have given himself another couple of years at the highest level after getting back the role of the Test vice-captain — which he had lost to KL Rahul after a string of failures in the tour of South Africa in 2021-22.

Rahane has enjoyed one of his most productive runs with the bat in years — whether for Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy, for Chennai Super Kings in the IPL or for the Indian team in the WTC final with a defiant 89. Should he continue to bat the way he has so far this year, his presence would provide solidity in the middle-order and allow others to take the attack to the opposition around him.

Mukesh finally rewarded for consistency

Unlike Pujara and Umesh, the absence of Mohammed Shami’s name in the squad lists has more to do with the team leadership giving his body some much-needed rest and managing his workload after a hectic IPL season with the Gujarat Titans and the WTC final that took place a few days after the final.

In his as well as Jasprit Bumrah’s absence, Mohammed Siraj will likely be crowned the leader of the attack in the Caribbean, which could be ideal to his growth as a bowler. Siraj has made tremendous progress ever since he burst into the Indian Test side during the 2020-21 tour of Australia, and is seen as a successor to Bumrah and Shami down the road.

Siraj will be tasked with co-ordinating the pace-bowling duties with two new faces — Navdeep Saini and Mukesh Choudhary. While the former has made just two Test appearances — both in the aforementioned trip to Australia, the latter just earned his maiden call-up into the Indian team.

Both have been rewarded for consistent performances for their respective state teams of Delhi and Bengal as well as for India A. The Tests against the West Indies presents the two an ideal opportunity for them to make an impression in the eyes of the powers that be and ensure they remain in the radar of the selectors even if Bumrah returns to full fitness and Shami is back in action after the break.

Samson thrown into the wicketkeepers’ mix

There was little doubt over who India’s first-choice wicketkeeper across formats was until Rishabh Pant met with a car accident on the Delhi-Dehradun highway last December. Since then, Team India have gone with Srikar Bharat as their Test wicketkeeper and Ishan Kishan for limited-overs fixtures.

Things, however, could change in the multi-format tour of the Caribbean.

Though he did a superb job behind stumps both in terms of grabbing difficult chances and assisting the captain and the bowler in DRS calls, Bharat’s failures with the bat might have forced the team management to rethink his position in the Test side. Which makes the possibility of Kishan making his Test debut at either Roseau or Port of Spain fairly likely.

At the same time, Samson did a fairly commendable job both with the bat in hand and behind the stumps in the recently-concluded IPL — while leading the Rajasthan Royals, at that. Kishan, on the other hand, had a stop-start run for the Mumbai Indians in the 16th edition of the league and often found himself getting dismissed after getting off to a promising start.

Thus, it’s not just with the batting and the bowling departments that the Indians have a lot of permutations and combinations to do in July and August. The wicketkeeper’s role will also have them scratching their heads through multiple team meetings before they finally arrive at a decision.

But with some wholesale changes being made to the squad, the team might just be entering a new era, one step at a time.

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