India have announced their squad for the much-anticipated summit clash of the Test Championship 2023 final. Team India, under the captaincy of Rohit Sharma, will lock horns with Australia in the final of the second edition of the Championship at the Kennington Oval in London on the 7th of June 2023.
Meanwhile, the opponents have already announced their squad under the captaincy of their regular skipper Pat Cummins. Coming back to the squad of India, there are a couple of inclusions and exclusions in the team which have left the fans experts to think about the reasons for the same.
Having said that, here we’ll have a look at three players who missed out on the squad of India for the Test Championship 2023 final.
The star Indian batting sensation and World’s number T20I batter Suryakumar Yadav is enduring a poor run of form with the bat in the limited-overs format lately. Apart from that, also made his debut in the red-ball cricket this year during the first of the four-match Test series against Australia.
Although he failed to live up to the expectations in the only inning he appeared to bat in; SKY could score only eight runs in the chance he got to bat against Australia. Considering his experience in the longest format of the game, the selectors decided to exclude the 32-year-old batter from the squad of India for the Test Championship final against India.
The young Mumbai batter has amazed everyone with his sensational batting in First-Class cricket. The 25-year-old has scored a ton of runs in the recently-concluded Ranji Trophy 2023 season. In the last seven innings of the five First-Class matches he played, Sarfaraz has scored 551 runs with an impressive average of 78.71 including three impressive half-centuries and a half-century to his name.
Everyone was expecting a maiden Test call to Sarfaraz Khan in the Indian squad for the Test Championship final against Australia. But in utter shock and dismay to the Indian cricket fans, the 25-year-old faced an ax yet another time while it was about to be picked in the squad of the national side of India.
One of the most shocking omissions from the recently selected squad of India for the high-profile Test Championship is the name which everybody is finding difficult to believe; here we’re talking about India’s spin sensation Kuldeep Yadav who has always proved his excellence in Test cricket whenever he was given the chance.
Last time, when he appeared for India in red-ball cricket, he won the ‘Player of the Match award for his amazing bowling in the first of the two-match Test series against Bangladesh in Chattogram. He scalped a total of eight wickets in the match with 40 runs with the bat in the first innings of the match. Despite these amazing performances, it is a big question to answer for the selectors on which grounds they axed Kuldeep Yadav from the Test squad.
Kuldeep has scalped 25 wickets in 10 innings of the last 6 Tests he appeared in with three five-wicket hauls and a best performance of 5/40 in an innings.