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Cricket legend and former India's captain Sunil Gavaskar wasn't surprised when Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) appointed Rohit Sharma as India's new Test skipper.
The 33-year-old Rohit was named the Test skipper after Virat Kohli's stepped down from the lead role post South Africa Test series debacle as the BCCI's selector committee's chairman Chetan Sharma announced the squad for the T20 International (T20I) and Test series against Sri Lanka at home.
In an exclusive interview with Sports Tak, Gavaskar said: "The guy who is a certainty in all three formats – when the selection committee sits down and think of who are the certainties, then Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli’s names will come up. And between them, Kohli is not doing captaincy, so it had to be Rohit Sharma. There was no surprise there."
"The way he has handled the team. The way players are getting clarity. I won’t say there wasn’t clarity earlier. That would be wrong to say as I was not in the dressing room, so I don’t know. But from the way he speaks, it seems like the players know their roles. And they know what the team expects from them and what the captain expects from them," he added.
Sharma was always the frontrunner for the skipper role. However, his fitness issues cast doubts on whether he would be picked as captain across all formats, with the likes of KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant popping up as potential options.
Sunil Gavaskar himself had said that Pant would be a good option for Test captaincy. However, Gavaskar explained that the wicketkeeper-batter's name had only come up because there was a lack of clarity on Sharma's fitness.
"Rishabh Pant’s name had come up because we didn’t know about Rohit Sharma’s fitness. But if he is completely fit, no one else can be the captain for all three formats. It was the correct decision," Gavaskar said.
The first match of two-match Test series against Sri Lanka will be played from March 4 in Mohali while the second and final match will be held in Bengaluru on March 12. Before the Test challenge, India will be playing three T20Is against Lanka on February 24 (Lucknow), February 26 (Dharamsala) and February 27 (Dharamsala).
India's Test squad: Rohit Sharma (Captain), Mayank, Priyank Panchal, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Hanuma Vihari, Shubman Gill, Rishabh Pant, KS Bharat, R Ashwin (subject to fitness), R Jadeja, Jayant Yadav, Kuldeep Yadav, Bumrah (VC), Shami, Siraj, Umesh, Saurabh Kumar.
India T20I squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Ruturaj Gaikwad, Ishan Kishan (wk), Suryakumar Yadav, Shreyas Iyer, Venkatesh Iyer, Deepak Hooda, Jasprit Bumrah (VC), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Deepak Chahar, Harshal Patel, Mohammed Siraj, Sanju Samson (wk), Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Ravi Bishnoi, Kuldeep Yadav, Avesh Khan.
