The India ‘A’ and India ‘B' teams that will take on Gujarat in the 50-over Deodhar Trophy between January 24 to January 28 have been announced, with the two sides consisting of the best performers from the 2015/16 domestic season. Gujarat, the Vijay Hazare Trophy champions, will be the third team in this historic event which is being played after a gap of one year.
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Baroda batsman Ambati Rayudu will be leading India ‘A’, Delhi batsman Unmukt Chand has been named captain of India ‘B’, while Gujarat will be led by Parthiv Patel. Earlier, this tournament had teams on a zonal basis, but the revamped Deodhar Trophy has space for the best performers across all the regional teams.
The presence of domestic stalwarts in the two sides who are not part of the Indian team that will tour Australia at the time make the Deodar Trophy a highly billed encounter. Murali Vijay, Jalaj Saxena, Mandeep Singh, Mayank Agarwal, Shreyas Iyer, Amit Mishra, Varun Aaron and Stuart Binny are among those who will try to prove their worth for the Asia Cup and World T20 limited-overs encounters as part of Team India.
Some fresh faces have also been included in the two squads like Bengal’s Sudip Chatterjee, who scored 4 centuries in the Ranji league stages this season, and Krishna Das, this season’s breakthrough pace bowler from Assam.
The tournament is slated to be held between January 24 and 28 and will feature four 50-over matches across five days.
"I am happy but do not want to think too much about this India A call-up. My job is to score runs and I know I will be rewarded. I also think I would not need time to adapt as we have just played Hazare Trophy and now we are playing Mushtaq Ali T20. So I am in limited overs mode," said the left-handed Chatterjee, who has been rewarded for a consistent season.
Some players, such as Robin Uthappa, however, have reason to be disappointed with the squad announcements, it having been made evidently clear where he stands in the scheme of things for the international arena.
India 'A': Murali Vijay, Jalaj Saxena, Mandeep Singh, Ambati Rayudu (captain), Kedar Jadhav, Naman Ojha, Parvez Rasool, Amit Mishra, Shahbaz Nadeem, Siddharth Kaul, Sreenath Aravind, Varun Aaron, Krishna Das, Sudip Chatterjee, Faiz Fazal.
India 'B': Unmukt Chand (captain), Mayank Agarwal, Baba Aparajith, Shreyas Iyer, Sheldon Jackson, Dinesh Karthik, Stuart Binny, Karn Sharma, Jayant Yadav, Dhawal Kulkarni, Nathu Singh, Shardul Thakur, Pawan Negi, Sachin Baby, Suryakumar Yadav.
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