Team India batting coach Vikram Rathour said that the team has not yet decided whether it would be experimenting again in the T20I series against the West Indies by opening the batting with Rishabh Pant. The wicketkeeper-batter opened the batting in the second ODI against the West Indies last week and batted at No.5 when Shikhar Dhawan was back in the mix in the final match.
‘We haven’t really decided that yet, we still have a couple of days to go. We had a travel day and rest day, so today we have our first practice day, once we get to look at the wicket and the kind of surface we are playing’, said Rathour while replying to a query during a virtual press conference on Monday. ‘We’ll then see, we have options available, KL is out I understand, we have Ishan and Ruturaj in the mix, so we will see’, he added.
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The India batting coach stressed that Pant is more suited to play in the middle-order as per the team requirement for now. ‘We have options, Rishabh is a fantastic player, he can play good cricket up the order but it depends what the team needs and what we are looking at’, Rathour said. ‘I have no doubt that he will be in team post-2023 too but we can utilize him more precisely in the middle order or lower order’, he added.
India and West Indies will face each other in a three-match T20I series, beginning Wednesday at the Eden Gardens, Kolkata.
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