- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Indian selectors are grooming KL Rahul for the role of national captaincy, Chetan Sharma, former India cricketer and chairman of the senior selection committee, said on Friday (31).
Rahul, who hit a match-winning hundred in the first Test match against South Africa in Centurion earlier this week, has been announced as the captain for the three-match one-day international series against the Proteas as regular white-ball captain Rohit Sharma has failed to recover from his hamstring injury that also forced him to miss the ongoing Test series. Speedster Jasprit Bumrah has been picked as the vice captain.
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Rahul, 29, is the vice captain of the current Test team which is being led by Virat Kohli.
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When asked about grooming Rahul for the top job in a press conference, Sharma said, “Yes, definitely we are looking at KL Rahul at the present. He is a three format player and he got a good experience of captaincy and he has proved his leadership qualities, this is what all selectors think.”
Rahul is not new to captaincy as the Karnataka cricketer has led the Punjab Kings franchise in the Indian Premier League.
“Like Rohit is not fit and we thought KL will be the best who can handle the side and that’s why we have good confidence in Rahul and we are grooming him,” Sharma said.
The three-match 50-over series will begin on January 19 at Boland Park, Paarl.
A lot has been debated over India captaincy in recent times. While Kohli served as the skipper in all the three formats till recently, he decided to give up the leadership in the T20 internationals after the World Cup which was held in October and November in the United Arab Emirates.
He was replaced by Rohit. However, a month after Kohli gave up the T20 captaincy, he had to hand over the captaincy in the 50-over format to Rohit as well and the matter sparked a major controversy with Kohli and Indian cricket board chief Sourav Ganguly giving contradictory versions over his captaincy.
Chetan Sharma, however, has broken in silence in favour of Ganguly saying that Kohli was requested a number of times to not to quit the captaincy in T20s but he stood firm.
