The Board of Control for Cricket in India yesterday announced a fifteen-member squad for the upcoming two-match Test series to be played in August against Sri Lanka. The announcement was welcomed by veteran Madhya Pradesh off-spinner Saransh Jain who was finally called up for test selection after a decade of tough domestic toils, but the selection committee made some big mistakes. A lot of hard work went towards Auqib Nabi and even after he got some good runs in the domestic circuit, the committee did not take him to a test match and the players and experts are not happy.
Auqib Nabi has been a force in domestic cricket. Last season he took sixty wickets in the Ranji Trophy and single-handedly took Jammu and Kashmir to their first title. His remarkable performance did not go unnoticed and he soon secured an Indian Premier League contract with the Delhi Capitals in the 2026 season. He was also called up for the India A side for the tour to Sri Lanka, where he showcased his potential by bagging six wickets in two four-day matches. Given this path Nabi and his supporters have always anticipated a national call up and so his failure to get through was painful.
Irfan Pathan, who has been instrumental in Nabi's development, said he was not happy with the selectors' decision of not including the young fast bowler. To Sportstar, Pathan said he could not see any logical reason the team would have included him. And he also commented on the scheduling decisions of past games, such as when he felt that it was in the best interests of the fast bowler Mohammad Siraj to perform in a bilateral test against Afghanistan that carried no World Test Championship points as Jasprit Bumrah had been put on the bench.
Pathan was quick to praise Saransh Jain for the selection, mentioning that a thirty-three-year-old who has been grinding out game after game in the domestic circuit for four or five years sends a positive message to the domestic circuit, but then he returned to the obvious contradiction in fast bowlers. As fast bowlers are more prone to injury than any other position, it is essential for the long-term success of the national team that there are backup pacers. By not taking Nabi, Pathan said that the selection committee would send a wrong signal to young people who give their bodies up for a lot in domestic cricket to make a chance of making it to the Indian Test team on their own.
