▲ 36 r/RajasthanRoyals
Yashasvi Jaiswal might be the unluckiest batter in Indian cricket right now.
An attacking opener, yet somehow not able to make into India's white-ball playing XI.
2024 T20 World Cup: Jaiswal named for 15-man squad. But had to be on bench due to new combination of experienced Rohit and Kohli as openers, Pant at 3. India won the World Cup and he won the winner's medal with zero games played. That's how it started.
2025: Left out of the Asia Cup squad too. Samson and Gill took the opener slots. Jaiswal's response? Pure class: "It's in the selectors' hands, I'll keep working on myself." The man deserved better than silence.
2026 T20 World Cup: Not even in the squad this time. Abhishek Sharma and Samson open, Ishan Kishan backs up. Due to team combination choices, and in-form players, Jaiswal was leftout in the cold who was "undroppable" not long ago.
And it's not like the form went down. Three matches, 145 runs, a century vs Haryana in the SMAT — right before the squad dropped. Jaiswal also had a good IPL 2025 season with 559 runs in 14 matches for the Rajasthan Royals at strike rate above 160.
And now with the emergence of a young talented Vaibhav Sooryavanshi already lined up above him for openers, Jaiswal position has almost being knocked out of contention.
It's already more than 2 years since he played any T20I for India.
Now ODI World Cup 2027 talk is starting, and early signs suggest Jaiswal could get squeezed out again — same top order logjam, same combination story.
First T20 bench duty, then a straight snub, now possibly a hat-trick of heartbreak.
Indian cricket has a real problem of plenty like Jaiswal, not a Jaiswal talent problem. Selectors' choice also plays a role who can bring any new in-form batters to cut out old lined up.
Give the man a chance before it's already too late for ODI as well.
u/sarvottam7kr — 18 days ago
▲ 64 r/csk
S Badrinath - the most underrated middle order batsman of CSK
On this sunday, it was 46th birthday of former India and Chennai Super Kings batter Subramaniam Badrinath.
Rarely anyone talked about it or even mention him in this community, so I'm just putting it out.
When CSK won in 2010 & 2011, as a middle order batsman S BADRINATH contributed around ~15% each year (3rd highest run scorer for CSK) more than MS Dhoni.
In those years, he never won Player of the match, but such contributions are very underrated.
u/sarvottam7kr — 1 month ago
TNPL 2026 DONE — DID CSK SCOUTS SHOW UP? Watch these Chepauk names.
Vida Kovai Kings won TNPL 2026, beating Madurai Panthers by 84 runs at Chepauk — 3rd title.
None of TNPL's big exports (Natarajan, W Sundar, Chakravarthy, Sudharsan) play for CSK, whose own ex-owner built the league.
Here's few players from TNPL, CSK can look out for:
- Deepesh Devendran — an 18-year-old India U19 World Cup winner playing for Madurai Panthers, who's spent this TNPL doing the one thing that gets every franchise's attention: bowling genuinely fast. He's been clocked at 146 kmph, crediting an off-season mentorship under Sandeep Warrier for the jump in pace, and he can drop it all the way down to a dipping 110 kmph slower off-cutter in the same over — pace and change-of-pace, not just one or the other.
- K Deeban Lingesh — a 26-year-old right-arm medium-pacer for Kovai Kings, and not a one-match wonder: he finished TNPL 2026 as the tournament's outright leading wicket-taker, with 17 wickets in 9 matches at an average of just 12.24 — comfortably clear of the chasing pack. That golden hat-trick in the knockouts — the first in TNPL history — wasn't a fluke stat, it was the exclamation point on a genuinely dominant season with the ball.
- Tushar Raheja — a 25-year-old left-handed wicketkeeper-batter, and the single biggest six-hitting outlier of the entire tournament: 422 runs and a staggering 34 sixes, nearly double the next-best on the six-hitting charts.
- Suresh Lokeshwar & S Radhakrishnan — Kovai Kings' opening pair, and the reason their innings so rarely started slow. Earlier in the season the two put on a 60-run opening stand in just 7 overs against Dindigul Dragons (31 and 24 respectively), setting up an 85-run win; in Qualifier 2 against Trichy they went even bigger, with Lokeshwar's 66 and Radhakrishnan's 48 doing the damage. A top-order engine that carried Kovai Kings through the knockouts and into a title, worth a scouting note regardless of who else comes calling.
- Siddharth Mahadevan — the veteran of this list at 32, a top-order batter with a first-class career stretching back to a 2014 Ranji Trophy debut for Tamil Nadu. Not exactly a fresh-off-the-boat prospect, but genuinely in form all season for Madurai — including a 60 off 42 balls, his maiden fifty of the campaign — and the kind of composed, experienced head who doesn't panic in a run chase even in a losing final.
Read more: https://cskden.in/news/tnpl-2026-final-csk-scouting-history
u/sarvottam7kr — 1 month ago