Shubman Gill and Rishabh Pant were out of the day-night test
Wriddhiman Saha, R Ashwin and Prithvi Shaw have been appointed to represent India in the Adelaide Test. Umesh Yadav will be the third closer. These were the main questions India was contemplating two days before the Test: whether to continue to support the flamboyant Shaw, whether to play a spinner and persist with Ashwin’s safest option, and which of the wicketkeepers to play. On the eve of the day-night test, they resolved all the confusion by naming the XI.
Shaw had been under pressure with Shubman Gill improving in both games on the tour, in the process impressing players like Allan Border and Sunil Gavaskar, the legends that give the series its name. However, Shaw was the starting starter and proved in one in four innings in New Zealand that he can be destructive. He scored 0, 19, 40 and 3 in both games on the tour, but more than the scores it was his loose shots that worried Gavaskar and Border. It is understood, however, that with an intermediate order in place, India also wanted continuity at the top and went with the starter.
Similarly, the Test spinner headline, especially with Ravindra Jadeja absent due to injury and concussion, kept his place. The last time India chose against Ashwin in a series opener was on the 2014-15 Australia tour, a move that was criticized for bleeding Karn Sharma, whose lack of experience was shown in a field where the Australian spinner Nathan Lyon proved to be the game changer.
As reasonable as it is to play Ashwin, this time around, there might have been a case for not playing a spinner at all in the series opener because in day and night testing in Australia, spinners have averaged 49 despite the average. Lyon’s superlative of 25 these matches. Lyon’s success is perhaps a sign that world-class spinners have the opportunity to correct these statistics based on a small sample of seven tests. There is no doubt that Ashwin and Lyon have been the top two spinners in test cricket, followed only slightly behind Jadeja, during this decade.
In the case of the wicketkeeper, however, India eliminated the current Pant, who has been preferred to Saha in tests outside of Asia, where most of the wicketkeeping is done by backtracking. It is in India where the team management believes that Saha’s superior ground maintenance skills come into play when facing the spinners. The team management seems to have decided that the pink ball long ago and will require a more established pure wicketkeeper. And despite Pant’s century of warm-up for the SCG, he had an ordinary tour of New Zealand, scoring 60 runs in four innings. He has yet to play for India in any international cricket since then.
Yadav was the favorite to be India’s third close, replacing the injured Ishant Sharma. Not only does he have experience in testing, this is his fourth tour of Australia, but he also impressed in the only warm-up game he played, taking 3 of 48 and 1 of 14 and also scoring practice runs in order.
India XI: 1 Mayank Agarwal, 2 Prithvi Shaw, 3 Cheteshwar Pujara, 4 Virat Kohli (capt.), 5 Ajinkya Rahane, 6 Hanuma Vihari, 7 Wriddhiman Saha (week), 8 R Ashwin, 9 Umesh Yadav, 10 Mohammed Shami, 11 Jasprit Bumrah
Sidharth Monga is assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
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