The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced the squads for the first round of the upcoming Duleep Trophy, scheduled to commence on September 5. The tournament will feature four teams - Team A, Team B, Team C, and Team D - captained by Shubman Gill, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Ruturaj Gaikwad, and Shreyas Iyer, respectively. The teams will compete in a round-robin format, with each team playing the other three once. The team that finishes at the top of the table after these six matches will be crowned the winner.
Notable Team India players such as Rishabh Pant, KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sarfaraz Khan, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Siraj, Mukesh Kumar, and Prasidh Krishna have been allocated to the four teams. However, prominent players like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, R Ashwin, and Jasprit Bumrah have not been included in the squads.
The upcoming matches are scheduled to be held at Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh and at M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. Following the first Test against Bangladesh in Chennai, the players will be rotated for the second and third round games. The replacements will be announced by the BCCI in the near future.
Nitish Kumar Reddy, the talented all-rounder from Andhra and Sunrisers Hyderabad, was unable to participate in the Zimbabwe series due to injury. However, he has now been selected to join Team B pending a fitness assessment.
Squads:
Team A: Shubman Gill (C), Mayank Agarwal, Riyan Parag, Dhruv Jurel, KL Rahul, Tilak Varma, Shivam Dube, Tanush Kotian, Kuldeep Yadav, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Khaleel Ahmed, Avesh Khan, Vidwath Kaverappa, Kumar Kushagra, Shaswat Rawat.
Team B: Abhimanyu Easwaran (C), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sarfaraz Khan, Rishabh Pant, Musheer Khan, Nitish Kumar Reddy* (subject to fitness), Washington Sundar, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohd Siraj, Yash Dayal, Mukesh Kumar, Rahul Chahar, R Sai Kishore, Mohit Awasthi, N Jagadeesan (WK).
Team C: Ruturaj Gaikwad (C), Sai Sudharsan, Rajat Patidar, Abishek Porel (WK), Suryakumar Yadav, B Indrajith, Hrithik Shokeen, Manav Suthar, Umran Malik, Vyshak Vijaykumar, Anshul Khamboj, Himanshu Chauhan, Mayank Markande, Aryan Juyal (WK), Sandeep Warrier.
Team D: Shreyas lyer (C), Atharva Taide, Yash Dubey, Devdutt Padikkal, Ishan Kishan (WK), Ricky Bhui, Saransh Jain, Axar Patel, Arshdeep Singh, Aditya Thakare, Harshit Rana, Tushar Deshpande, Akash Sengupta, KS Bharat (WK), Saurabh Kumar.
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