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KL Rahul’s current situation is becoming mysterious, to say the least. India’s senior men’s selection committee headed by Ajit Agarkar and the team management continue to wait as suspense continues over the middle-order batsman’s availability for the fifth and final Test against England in Dharamsala.
Since he complained of pain in his right quadriceps after the Hyderabad Test, Rahul, even after achieving “90% match fitness and progressing well”, is still not available for selection. This is almost a month after he complained of “pain” and 16 days. after being left with only 10% to cover. The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) media advisory on February 12 suggested that the experienced batsman should be fine for the remaining two Tests, but that has not been the case.
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Even captain Rohit Sharma, after the post-match press conference in Rajkot, felt that Rahul “should be fine” for the Ranchi Test but he remained unavailable. Two days after the captain’s comment, another notice from the Indian cricket board ruled him out. of the Ranchi test but did not give any percentage details.
As CricketNext reported last week, Rahul is understood to have regained match fitness but is unsure of returning to the field. It has now been widely reported that he is out of the country seeking specialist opinion and has clearly left the BCCI medical unit, the National Cricket Academy (NCA) and the management in a strange situation.
“For me, he is either fit or not. At the moment it is not. I’m not sure of the percentage or what phase it is in. Only the medical team can confirm it. As far as we are concerned, he is not available and we are concentrating on the team we have,” India batting coach Vikram Rathour said before the Ranchi Test.
Neither the BCCI nor chairman of selector Ajit Agarkar has responded to CricketNext’s multiple queries and there is no official information or advisory regarding Rahul’s current status. Since January 29, there have been four updates from the BCCI on Rahul, but they have only become more ambiguous. As things stand, Rahul is understood to be fit but not sure about returning to action and it raises a very important question – how can the BCCI allow a player to dictate the narrative based on his feelings?
Had Rahul been available, he would have replaced the out-of-form Rajat Patidar in the XI. As of February 28, the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association (MPCA) had not heard anything about Rajat Patidar from the Indian cricket committee and it is certain that the state, which will face Vidarbha in the semi-final of the Ranji Trophy of On March 2, he wanted Patidar for the high-profile clash if he was not going to play the Dharamsala match.
“If they were not going to play him in Dharamsala, we had asked them to release Rajat for the semi-final. Obviously the first priority is to play Test cricket for India, but if he wasn’t going to play, we would have liked to use his services. Even coach Rahul Dravid knows the importance of the Ranji Trophy semi-final. We thought that if Rahul had returned to replace Rajat in the XI and Devdutt Padikkal was already there as a substitute on the bench, he would have made sense to play Rajat in the semi-final. But now that Rahul’s return seems unlikely, Rajat could well stay in the team,” says an MPCA official.
The Madhya Pradesh team took a flight this afternoon for the away match on March 2 and both players and MPCA officials are still in the dark about Rajat.