5 cricketers who were unlucky to miss out on the India A squad for the upcoming season
The BCCI recently announced the India A squad that will travel to Australia to play a number of games in August. No less than a total of ten changes were made to the previous India A squad. The team will play Australia A, South Africa A and Cricket Australia's National Performance Squad in a quadrangular series in Townsville and Mackay starting in August. The then concludes with two four-day games against Australia A in Brisbane in September.
Read: India A squad announced for Australia Tour
The announced squad grabbed a number of headlines for a number of reasons. First, Naman Ojha was named skipper. The wicketkeeper-batsman Naman will have fond memories of a memorable Australia tour with the India A team in 2014 when he had struck scoring 219*, 101* and 110 in three successive innings. Second, because the squad included a total of 9 players from the recently concluded tour of Zimbabwe including the likes of Kedar Jadhav, Axar Patel, Barinder Sran and Dhawal Kulkarni. Three, becuase there were a number of notable absentees who were unlucky to be excluded from the squad.
FULL SQUAD: Naman Ojha (capt), Faiz Fazal, Akhil Herwadkar, Shreyas Iyer, Karun Nair, Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Vijay Shankar, Axar Patel, Jayant Yadav, Varun Aaron, Dhawal Kulkarni, Jaydev Unadkat, Barinder Sran, Shahbaz Nadeem, Sanju Samson
Here, we list 5 such cricketers who were unlucky to miss out on making the squad:
1) Unmukt Chand
Unmukt Chand must be wondering what tricks the gods are playing with him. Long heralded as the next star for India, things have just not gone accordingly to plan for the Delhi born cricketer. This exclusion being the latest in a series of disappointments for him. Unmukt, had led India A to victory against Bangladesh A in their last one-day series in September 2015 and would have surely hoped on being on the squad that travels to down under.
It was a disappointing season for the right-handed batsmen in the Ranji Trophy, scoring 439 runs from 7 games at an average under 35. Included in the IPL squad for the Mumbai Indians, he only had one outing, and he failed to trouble the scorers and he walked back for 0. Most recently, he was seen in the Dhaka Premier League, where he impressed for his team Prime Bank. Unmukt will surely be disappointed with this latest setback and hope to come back strong.