Shreyas Iyer continues to remain captain, while Suryakumar Yadav, Shivam Dube and Shardul Thakur feature in a full-strength 17-member squad. Opener Ayush Mhatre, who missed the domestic T20 competition to be part of India’s Under-19 Asia Cup squad, returns to the mix.
Shaw’s exclusion comes at a time when questions continue to be raised about his form and fitness. He failed to hit a half-century in nine innings in the SMA Trophy – 197 runs with a highest of 49 against Vidarbha in the quarter-final.
Shaw expressed surprise at his omission by posting his List A stats in an Instagram story. “Tell me god, what more do I have to see…if 65 innings, 3399 runs at an average of 55.7 with a strike rate of 126, I’m not good enough…but I will keep my faith in you and hopefully people believe in me still…cause I will come back for sure. Om Sai Ram.”
“He needs to get his work ethics right, and if he does that, the sky is the limit for him,” Iyer said after Mumbai won the SMA Trophy. “We can’t babysit anyone, right? Every professional who is playing at this level, they need to know what they should be doing. And he has also done it in the past; it’s not that he hasn’t. He has to focus, he has to sit back, [and] put a thinking cap on, and then figure out himself. He will get the answer by himself.
