The Indian team has been announced for the Test and ODI series against the West Indies. This time three new faces have been included in the Indian team. Rituraj Gaikwad, Yashasvi Jaiswal, and Mukesh Kumar, who have done well in IPL 2023, have been given a place in the Indian Test team. At the same time, players like Sarfaraz Khan and Abhimanyu Easwaran, who have been doing consistently well in domestic cricket, have been ignored again. Many former cricketers are angry with this decision of the selectors. Akash Chopra and Abhinav Mukund have also expressed displeasure over Sarfaraz Khan being ignored.
Unable to understand these selections- too many thoughts in my head to compile into a tweet. But what is the incentive for a young player to take pride in playing for his state anymore? Clearly the franchise route is a faster way to scale the grade. #INDvsWI


Indian batsman Abhinav Mukund took to Twitter to question the selection committee's process of picking players. He took a dig at the selectors for giving more importance to IPL performances than first-class cricket. Mukund wrote in his tweet "Unable to understand these selections - too many thoughts in my head to sum them up in a tweet. But encouragement for a youngster to be proud to play for his state now" What is it? Franchise cricket is a better way to break into the Indian team.

Abhinav's tweet comes after much debate over the absence of domestic stars like Sarfaraz Khan and Abhimanyu Easwaran in India's Test team. Like Mukund, former Indian cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar and Aakash Chopra are surprised by the decisions of the BCCI selection committee for the West Indies tour.

Aakash Chopra said on his YouTube channel "What should Sarfaraz do? If you see his record in the last three years, he is way above the rest. He has scored runs everywhere. Still, if he doesn't get selected...So what message does this send? That question needs to be asked. If there is some other reason, something that you and I don't know, then make it public. Just say that you don't like that particular thing about Sarfaraz, and that's why you are not considering him. But we don't know whether that is the case or not. I don't know whether anyone told Sarfaraz about it or not. If you don't value first-class runs, then it becomes difficult to accept."

(pc amarujala)