Star Sports deletes promo indicating Hardik Pandya as India captain for Sri Lanka T20Is after backlash
On Sunday evening Star Sports released a video on Twitter with the caption mentioning, “Hardik 'Raj”.
India completed their final assignment for 2022 with a thrilling three-wicket win against Bangladesh in Dhaka on Sunday. It is time to look forward to 2023 where they will kick start the season with a home series against Sri Lanka. The selection committee are yet to announce the squad for the limited-overs contest where India will play three T20Is and as many ODIs, but it seems Star Sports have already revealed that Hardik Pandya will be leading the Indian side.
The outgoing selection committee, led by Chetan Sharma, have been assigned the task of picking the two white-ball sides. While they are yet to have a meeting on the two teams, keeping in mind the workload management, the recent debate on having specialists for each format and the injury concerns, Star Sports might just have leaked the information on who would lead the Indian side.
On Sunday evening, hours after the end of the Bangladesh Test match in Mirpur, Star Sports released a video on Twitter with the caption mentioning, "Hardik 'Raj". At the end of the video, they even showed the poster for the series which had Dasun Shanka, Sri Lanka captain, on one side and Hardik on the other.
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".@hardikpandya7 is ready to kick-start the New Year with a bang against the Asian T20I Champions! #BelieveInBlue & get ready to witness some action from this new #TeamIndia under the Hardik 'Raj' Mastercard #INDvSL series | Starts Jan 3 | Star Sports & Disney+Hotstar," the caption read. They later deleted the tweet. Here is the video of the promo…
This implies that Rohit Sharma won't be able to make the T20I series, missing a second consecutive contest with his thumb injury. He had incurred the injury during the ODIs in Bangladesh and hence was ruled out of the two Tests.
Earlier on Saturday, PTI had reported that KL Rahul is likely to face the axe for the T20I series against Sri Lanka while players like Virat Kohli would be rest for the series to make way for specialist players.
The T20I series would begin from January 3 while the ODIs would start from January 12.
