Mumbai teenager Prithvi Shaw is all set to make his Test debut in the first Test against West Indies at Rajkot.
There are only three openers – KL Rahul, Prithvi Shaw and Mayank Agarwal – in the squad and Mayank wasn’t named in the 12 for the first Test. It clears the way for the 18-year-old from Mumbai to make a debut.
Hanuma Vihari, who had a made gritty 56 on debut at The Oval against England, has been dropped.
The youngster was always among the big names in inter-school cricket but he shot to prominence as a 14-year old when he scored 546 off 330 balls, an innings that included 85 fours and five sixes for his school Rizvi Springfield in the Harris Shield in 2013.
He quickly graduated to junior cricket for India, captained the U-19 team to the title and had an impressive Ranji debut season ever.
He likes to play his shots and in that sense, he will be a like-for-like replacement for Shikhar Dhawan.
Indian captain Virat Kohli also spoke about his absence of Asia Cup and the need to recover.
“I am feeling rejuvenated again mental and physical both because of the intensity of the two tours, South Africa and England.
People talk about workload but they don’t understand the concept of workload, they refer to workload as number of games played which is not workload. If I get zero in a game that is not workload, if I bat for six hours, that is workload,” he said at the pre-match conference.
People don’t want to go into detail about what exactly the term means when the trainer and the physio take a decision as you saw, someone like a Hardik [Pandya] broke down but people cannot anticipate that. From the outside you cannot tell how a person is like with their bodies so I definitely needed a break because my back went once in South Africa and then in England.
Looking at the World Cup, I think these are very important things to consider to give players ample rest, an opportunity to train well and come back stronger because you don’t want people breaking down at very important stages,” he added.
India’s 12-member squad for first Test: Kohli (c), Rahul, Shaw, Pujara, Rahane, Pant (wk), R Ashwin, R Jadeja, Kuldeep, Shami, Umesh, Thakur.