Indian cricket fans surprised with the inclusion of Kedar Jadhav in the ODI squad for West Indies tour
Jadhav didn't really have a fruitful World Cup and was expected to be dropped from the ODI team.
Indian selectors named the squad for the tour of West Indies where the team will play 3 T20Is, as many ODIs and a couple of Tests. On expected grounds, they named a bunch of youngsters and future-prospect players for the tour along with the regular names. One name that surprised many was that of Kedar Jadhav in the ODI squad.
Jadhav played 6 matches out of India’s 9 matches in the World Cup – he got the opportunity to bat on 4 occasions. Out of that, his best performance was in the game against Afghanistan scoring a half century, he made a match-winning contribution batting alongside MS Dhoni. With the ball, the team didn’t call for Jadhav’s services often in the tournament and thus couldn’t make a difference there either.
The chairman of selectors, MSK Prasad was asked the rationale behind his selection and he said that Jadhav hadn’t done anything wrong in the World Cup to be excluded. At the same time they are looking at other options for the future. The selectors included Washington Sundar and Krunal Pandya in the T20I team both of who bowl spin and can bat as well.
He mentioned that the selection committee is looking at grooming players from the T20I team towards ODIs until then Jadhav will be persisted with.
“Kedar (Jadhav) has not done anything wrong for his non-selection. We considered him, we are also getting the backups ready and we will monitor his progress. We will see that some of the players are brought in to T20s. And we will see how those guys progress in the ODI squad,” Prasad said at the press conference after naming the India squad for all three formats.
Jadhav in his ODI career so far has played 65 matches – scored 1254 runs at an average of 43 and picked up 27 wickets. Going into the World Cup, he was looked at as the player who would give the skipper a few overs in case one of the five bowlers had an off day.
Here is how Twitterati reacted to Jadhav’s surprise selection in the West Indies ODI team:
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