Exclusion of KL Rahul from two Asia Cup games throws a spanner in India’s World Cup preparations
KL Rahul won’t be travelling with the Indian team to Pallekele today and is set to miss the first two games of India’s Asia Cup campaign that begins on September 2 against Pakistan, head coach Rahul Dravid informed during a press conference on Tuesday.
The Karnataka batter is not “fully fit” and will stay back at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) in Bengaluru to work on his fitness in a bid to be available for the Super 4s stage of the six-team tournament. That means Rahul won’t be in action before September 6. The last date to submit preliminary squads for the ICC Men’s World Cup is September 5.
India would hope it is only a (yet another) bump in the road and not an end of the road.
For, India have bilindly put their faith in Rahul by picking him in the 17-member squad for the Asia Cup despite him being out of action since early May.
The Asia Cup was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for the World Cup. But, with just a couple of months and a maximum of nine ODIs left to go, India are yet to finalise the combination they would go with at the World Cup. How could they when five of their key players have been injured and out of action for a long time.
The biggest worry for India is the middle-order, where Rahul would have batted.
Another middle-order batter, Shreyas Iyer, is also making a return from back injury that he picked up in March. Though Dravid would like to tell everyone that he “could have told you 18-19 months ago who three candidates for the two spots (No. 4 and 5) were”, the truth is he couldn’t have told us about the injury-forced long lay-offs and the disbalance it would create.
“It was always between Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant.
