New Delhi: Team India will take on Australia in the first Test at Perth on November 22. The Men in Blue will be without their regular captain and opener Rohit Sharma for the series opener and the team management has the massive task of finding his replacement.
As per reports, Gautam Gambhir and his coaching staff have backed KL Rahul to open in the first Test. He was also part of the India A squad for the second unofficial Test against Australia A where he opened the innings for the team.
However, he only managed to score 14 runs in both innings at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Rahul has struggled to score runs recently, and former India cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar believes that Abhimanyu Easwaran should open with Yashasvi Jaiswal in the first Test. He said that the team management picked Easwaran as an opener because of his brilliant performance in the first-class matches. He further added that KL Rahul isn’t setting the stage on fire as an opener, so Easwaran should open.
“You picked him as an opener because of his tremendous performance at the first-class level. And if you’re not going to value that and go buy a couple of warmup matches in conditions that you’ve been exposed to for the first time, it’s not the right thing to do, and it’s not like KL Rahul as opener is setting the stage on fire, so I’ll stick with Easwaran at the top for those reasons,” Manjrekar said on ESPNCricinfo.
KL Rahul’s Test numbers since 2022
Rahul has been struggling to score runs in the longest format and since 2022, he has scored 514 runs in 12 Test matches (21 innings) at an average of 25.7. He has registered three half-centuries and a century during this time. As an opener, his numbers in Australia are also not good with the 32-year-old scoring 183 runs in four matches (seven innings) at an average of 26.14 and a strike rate of 45.29 with one century.
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