When the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Friday (December 31) announced the 18-man squad for the three-match ODI series against Proteas, who knew it would come up with as many surprises which will raise eyebrows.
Sans Rohit Sharma, who will miss out on the ODI series due to injury, KL Rahul will lead the pack despite the services of Virat Kohli.
Interestingly, it drew the attention of the former Pakistan batter Salman Butt who justified the decision and explained that with Rohit replacing Kohli as full-time white-ball captain last month, it was only logical to make a decision for the future and select a leader, albeit as a stand-in option, who could lead the India team in the future.
"Virat Kohli will not lead this team any further. And, since he is no longer going to captain the team, they (the management) will pick the vice-captain as the stand-in skipper, who can lead the team in the future and has also captained in the IPL," Salman said.
Drawing parallels from the MS Dhoni era, the 37-year old pointed out that the Indian team, for a long time, has been following the same pattern of grooming youngsters for captaincy, something which started during Dhoni's captaincy, when Kohli and other youngsters were asked to lead the team against weaker opponents.
"This has been the pattern that Indian cricket has been following. Whenever there is a chance, they give youngsters the opportunity and hand him the responsibility to test him. So, I feel this is a good opportunity for KL Rahul," he said.
"We saw this even during MS Dhoni's time. Whenever India were up against smaller nations, he used to hand the captaincy to youngsters and the team used to win," he further added.
Besides handing over the baton to Rahul, Indian selectors also decided to make seam-bowling sensation Jasprit Bumrah the vice-captain for the ODI series against South Africa. Other than that, Shikhar Dhawan has also been recalled for the three-match ODI duel which is slated to begin from January 19.
While India registered a historic triumph in Centurion, Kohli struggled again, scoring 35 and 18 in two innings. For the second year in a row, he failed to score an international hundred. Significantly, like in England, he was dismissed flashing outside the off stump.
Speaking on Virat's out-of-touch batting, Butt put forth his advice to Kohli to deal with the bad patch.
“There are only two ways Kohli can come out of this bad patch. Either he completely abandons the drive for a while and relies on other shots or he goes all out and tries to hit his way out of trouble. If he wants to play a long innings, he will have to concentrate extra hard to not drive balls outside the off stump. If he manages to do that, things could start to flow again. But it all depends on how he wants to do it.”
India ODI squad: KL Rahul (Captain), Shikhar Dhawan, Ruturaj Gaekwad, Virat Kohli, Surya Kumar Yadav, Shreyas Iyer, Venkatesh Iyer, Rishabh Pant (Wicket keeper), Ishan Kishan (Wicket keeper), Y Chahal, Ravichandran Ashwin, Washington Sundar, Jasprit Bumrah (Vice Captain), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Deepak Chahar, Prasidh Krishna, Shardul Thakur, Mohd. Siraj.
