NEW DELHI: As India get their preparations for the 2027 World Cup rolling with the three-ODI series in England, starting in Birmingham on Tuesday, the biggest challenge will be to rotate the senior players to give the younger, inexperienced crop more game time. TOI understands that the team management and the selectors are trying to convince the senior players about the rotation policy for a while now. It is learnt that the team management thought about resting Rohit Sharma in the third ODI against Afghanistan last month to accommodate Yashasvi Jaiswal at the top of the order. Eventually, captain Shubman Gill decided to bat at No. 3 with Rohit opening the batting with Jaiswal. Jaiswal, however, has missed out on this tour despite scoring two centuries in his last three ODIs. The pressure will be on Rohit if he gets a full run in this series with no Jaiswal around. The team management would prefer him scoring in the initial stages of the series rather than going big in the last match of a series as he has been doing in the last few series. Ahead of the ODI series against Afghanistan, the Indian team management had hinted about how it wanted to rotate between Ishan Kishan, Yashasvi Jaiswal and KL Rahul in the absence of Virat Kohli. As it turned out, Ishan was given the wicketkeeping duties while Rahul was rested for the last ODI. It will be a task for the team management to convince the veterans in the team, who only play ODI cricket, to sit out of certain matches. With Kohli and Rohit back, it will be interesting how the team management goes about the rotation policy. Sources told TOI that Jaiswal remains firmly in the plans for the ODI World Cup and the team management wants to have a wicketkeeper ready as backup for Rahul. “The team management doesn’t want a situation where a senior player breaks down and there is no one ready with enough game time. The issue is that Rohit, Kohli and Rahul don’t play much of international white-ball cricket besides ODIs. Rohit may get a full run in England. If his form suffers here, he may not get that run in the following series,” sources said. “You know, in such a series, it doesn’t feel like an unsettled XI. You have to give a chance to the new players. You have to give them experience as we were talking about experience, the more pressure situations they are in and the more they do well, and the better it will be for us before the World Cup,” Gill said on Monday. “You play 11 matches in the World Cup and, usually, the bilateral series we play is 5 or 3 matches. Usually, it is 3 matches. So, playing 3 matches and playing 11 matches makes a big difference,” he added.
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Gill also highlighted how the series in England may be the closest to conditions they are expected to encounter in South Africa. “The preparation for the World Cup (2027) is very important. Our mindset is that what kind of combination and the wickets we will get in South Africa will be close to what we will play here. So what kind of combination we can try and which combination is good for us. So in that sense, it is a very important series (vs England) for us,” he said.
