The five wise men of Indian cricket, led by M.S.K. Prasad, will meet in Mumbai on Monday to pick the squad for the 2019 World Cup in England. While most of the players pick themselves, thanks to their consistent show in recent times, there are three main areas of concern that the selectors need to take a call on when they sit down to pick the 15-member squad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The much-debated number four slot, whether \nRishabh Pant or Dinesh Karthik go as the second wicket-keeper behind MS \nDhoni and finally, if the team will pick a fourth pacer or an additional\n third spinner considering that the wickets will be on the slower side \nat this time of the year in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Starting with the number \nfour slot, while there have been talks ranging from Ambati Rayudu, KL \nRahul, Ajinkya Rahane and Shreyas Iyer, it could well be that the team \nmanagement will continue with the recent experiment of playing Vijay \nShankar at the number four slot with Rahul being drafted as the official\n back-up opener as well as the answer to all the other top-order batting\n slots if and when any of the other batsman in the top line-up is \ninjured or out of form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Former India skipper Sunil Gavaskar has \nalso spoken about how Rahul can fit into any position in the batting \norder considering he is an opener and that his IPL form is something \nthat cannot be ignored. Interestingly, former India opener Gautam \nGambhir has also proposed the name of Sanju Samson. But the Kerala and \nRajasthan Royals batsman has just not been consistent enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With\n the team management making it clear after the Nidahas Trophy that Rahul\n will be seen primarily as the third opener, he will only walk into the \nteam as the back-up opener and not as a number four batsman. The fact \nthat Shankar has continued to bat at number three or four in this Indian\n Premier League (IPL) for the Sunrisers Hyderabad is another hint that \nthe team management might have asked him to carry on batting at the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While\n he told IANS on Friday that the move in the IPL wasn\u2019t aimed at sealing\n the number four spot in the showpiece event, he does look like one of \nthe favourites to seal the much-debated spot in Indian cricket at \npresent.What this also means is that the likes of Shreyas Iyer or \nAjinkya Rahane will be out of the equation. While Iyer has been scoring \nheavily without the selectors acknowledging his efforts, Rahane has \nsomehow failed to get the backing of the selectors even though he has \nproved himself whenever given an opportunity. In fact, he was a hit in \nthe middle-order in the last ODI series that he played against South \nAfrica.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The five wise men of Indian cricket, led by M.S.K. Prasad, will meet in Mumbai on Monday to pick the squad for the 2019 World Cup in England. While most of the players pick themselves, thanks to their consistent show in recent times, there are three main areas of concern that the selectors need to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59177,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59178,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59176\/revisions\/59178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}