Selection in Team India based on IPL: Many contenders, but not a single top Ranji player's Test debut in 4 years

The season of Ranji Trophy 2022-23 is over. Saurashtra became champions for the second time. 10 players scored more than 700 runs in the season while scoring runs. All the bowlers in the top 10 took more than 35 wickets in the season. However, what will happen to these players after this is not decided. Ranji, which was considered the "Road to Team India" for the last few years, is no longer like that.

Things have been dire since the 2018-19 season, where not a single player who was in the top-10 bowlers or batsmen in Ranji has made it to the Indian Test team. After a long struggle, it is not certain that a player will make a place in the team even after scoring hundreds of runs. So no one knows where the path to a place in Team India's Test team goes.

From the year 2018 till now, 16 players have made their Test debut. Of these, 6 batsmen, 6 bowlers, 2 all-rounders, and 2 wicket-keeper batsmen made it to the team. Among these batsmen, Mayank Agarwal and Hanuma Vihari (both top-10 scorers of the 2017-18 season, debuting in 2018) were the only players who reached the team based on their performances in Ranji in the last 5 years.

Batters like Sarfaraz out, league bowlers did not last long

Players like Sarfaraz Khan (Mumbai), R Samarth (Karnataka), Sheldon Jackson (Saurashtra), and Abhimanyu Easwaran (Bengal) who were among the top-10 scorers more than once did not get a chance to debut. These are just a few names that are often heard in the domestic circuit. There are also players like Milind Kumar (Sikkim) or R Dalal (Arunachal), who have been top-scorers with over 1300 runs in a season but have not made it to the Indian team.

Barring Navdeep Saini and Shahbaz Nadeem, none of the bowlers who have won Indian Test caps in the last five years have been among the top performers in previous Ranji matches. During this, Natarajan, Siraj, Shardul, and Bumrah along with Saini, and Shahbaz made their debut based on IPL form, out of which only Siraj and Bumrah appear regularly in the team. Shardal played the last Test in 2022, while Natarajan in January 2021. On the other hand, Jalaj (Kerala), Saurabh Kumar (UP), Mukesh Kumar (Bengal), Dharmendra Jadeja (Saurashtra), Aditya Sarwate (Vidarbha), etc. are waiting for their chance to perform consistently.

Arpit, who was the second top scorer of the season with 907 runs in the recently concluded season, was at number 11 in terms of runs scored in the 2019-20 season. However, due to the neglect of the selectors, he is now more than 34 years old and it is very difficult to make his place on the team. There are many other players like this.

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