Ishan Kishan appointed Jharkhand captain for the Vijay Hazare Trophy

The Jharkhand team appointed a new captain heading into the Vijay Hazare Trophy 2017-18. MS Dhoni who captained them in the previous edition of the tournament is away on national duty and thus the team had to appoint a new captain. They decided to hand over the responsibility to young Ishan Kishan. Jharkhand had an average Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy as they qualified for the Super League but didn’t make it through.

Kishan has the senior players like Virat Singh, Saurabh Tiwary, Shahbaz Nadeem, Monu Singh and Aaron at his disposal. They will miss the services of their most consistent batsman Ishank Jaggi who sustained an injury during the T20 tournament and has thus been ruled out of the VHT.

The newly appointed captain’s experience at the youth level will come to his aid while leading the state side. He led the India U19 team in the junior World Cup 2016 with Rahul Dravid as the coach. The Boys in Blue made their way to the final but were outplayed by the Windies and denied their fourth title. Kishan has also played a couple of seasons in the IPL.

He was picked up by the Gujarat Lions in the 2016 edition and represented them in five matches. They trusted him with the captaincy duties in the following season and he scored 277 runs in 11 matches with a strike rate of 134 batting alongside the great Brendon McCullum. This time around in the IPL 2018 auction he was signed up by the Mumbai Indians for Rs. 6.2 crore.

Overall in his career, the youngster played 32 first-class matches, has 2097 runs to his name, in List A cricket he has featured in 14 games and tallies 329 runs along with 919 runs in T20s having featured in 41 matches.

Jharkhand will play the opening match of the tournament against Vidarbha on February 5 (Monday) in Hyderabad that will host all the matches of the VHT 2017-18. Their opponent for the second game on February 6 is home team Hyderabad, next up they face Services on Feb 8 while the third match is slated against Saurashtra on Feb 11 following which they will lock horns with Chhattisgarh on Feb 12 and the last match of the group stages is a tie against Jammu & Kashmir on Feb 14.

Jharkhand Squad:

Ishan Kishan (Captain), Virat Singh, Nazim Siddiqui, Sumit Kumar, Kumar Debabrata, Saurabh Tiwary Atul Singh Surwar, Uttarkash Singh, Aditya Roy, Shahbaz Nadeem, Rahul Shukla, Monu Singh, Varun Aron, Jasaran Singh, Vikash Singh.