Under the leadership of brother Krunal Pandya, Hardik Pandya will participate in India's domestic T20 competition Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy after 8 years. Hardik will support the Baroda team as they aim to improve on their runner-up result from the previous year's competition. On November 23, the domestic competition will begin.
Baroda have been placed in Group B along with Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Saurashtra, Karnataka and Sikkim. As per the report from Times of India, Hardik will be returning to domestic cricket with this tournament.
Under the leadership of Krunal Pandya, Baroda has started the domestic cricket season well. After five rounds of play with four wins and a loss, Baroda, who are in Group A of the Elite Division, are at the top of the rankings with 27 points and a victory quotient of 1.771. They have drawn with Tripura and defeated Mumbai, Services, Odisha, and Meghalaya. The last time Hardik played for the Indian cricket team was in South Africa, where the team captained by Suryakumar Yadav won the four-match Twenty20 International series 3-1. Pandya produced modest returns of 59 runs and two wickets during the series.
Krunal, meanwhile, has been in great touch and has enjoyed a stellar start to the domestic season. In the first round of the Ranji Trophy, the southpaw captained Baroda, and the team won four of their five games, including a historic victory over Mumbai, to take the lead in Group A of the Elite Division. With 367 runs from seven innings and a century and three half-centuries, the left-hander with the bat has also had an unforgettable season. He participated in the KSCA (Karnataka State Cricket Association) event before to the red-ball tournament, where he helped the team win with a century in the final.
He would now try to finish the run in the shortest format possible and carry out more of his actions from the SMAT 2023 edition. Under Krunal's leadership, Baroda lost the title match to Punjab, despite the fact that the all-rounder led the team in runs scored with 323—including three half-centuries. He contributed seven wickets at an economy rate of just 6.03 and was also quite productive with the ball.
