Hardik Pandya and Yashasvi Jaiswal are going to be under the spotlight, feels former Australia captain Aaron Finch. Speaking on Star Sports ahead of the RR vs MI game in Jaipur, Finch said that both players have not performed well in the tournament and pressure has started to build on them ahead of the T20 World Cup 2024.
Hardik Pandya had captained the Indian side after the 2022 edition of the tournament but has been absent from the Indian team since his ankle injury in the ODI World Cup 2023. In the absence of Pandya in the line-up Suryakuymar Yadav was captaining India, but the selection committee decided to bring back Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli once again into the national fray right before the world tournament.
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With Pandya’s form and captaincy being poor in the Indian Premier League this season, Finch felt that the spotlight would be on the MI captain who would be hoping to get a good run before the squad is announced in the last days of April.
Yashasvi Jaiswal on the other hand has been uncharacteristically poor in the IPL 2024 season. Jaiswal’s meteoric 2023 season in IPL and the domestic circuit got him into the Indian team where the young left-hander had been in tremendous form. The selfless Jaiswal dropped his form in the IPL and has not been able to score a single fifty so far in his 7 innings. The batter has just scored 121 runs and has not looked solid in any of his innings.
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Jaiswal is expected to be in competition with Shubman Gill for the openers’ spot and it is possible out of the two, only one makes it for the tournament, set to be held in June.
With the duo competing for respective spots in the national team, Finch felt that this could be the game that they cut loose.
MI play RR at the Sawai Mansingh stadium in Jaipur.
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