MS Dhoni, the odd man out in team of five new faces

A tour of Zimbabwe is a double-edged sword for Indian cricketers in the recent years. The conventional wisdom is that if you succeed you don’t really make a name for yourself but if you fail, you lose face and are in danger of slinking back to anonymity. It’s also a tour where selectors can experiment easily. The seniors are usually in fatigue mode, the tour also often comes at end of a busy season, and if you don’t try out new faces against Zimbabwe, then when will you? So it’s not a surprise to see only MS Dhoni being the sole senior in the team.

So we have at least five brand-new faces in the team – Faiz Fazal, Yuzvendra Chahal, Karun Nair, Mandeep Singh, Jayant Yadav, Rishi Dhawan, and for that matter KL Rahul (who will make his ODI debut and interestingly the only name to feature in both Zimbabwe and West Indies tours). However, for all the new names in the batting department, the ones that really makes you want to watch their progress closely are the two spinners — JayantYadav and Yuzvendra Chahal.