India Tour of England: Why Jasprit Bumrah & KL Rahul were royally snubbed for vice-captaincy role?

Indian Team announced the squad for the upcoming five-match Test tour of England, starting on June 20. Shubman Gill has taken over the captaincy from Rohit Sharma, while Rishabh Pant has been named as vice-captain of the side. Both the decisions raised some eyebrows as a lot of experts and fans expected either Jasprit Bumrah or KL Rahul to be named as captain or vice-captain for the England tour. Chief selector Ajit Agarkar elaborated on why Bumrah and Rahul were not named as vice-captains to Gill.

Some reports mentioned that the pacer wont play all the five Tests due to workload management. The BCCI selection panel's main focus was to have Bumrah fit for all five Tests and not overburden him with the additional captaincy responsibilities also. Speaking about Rahul, the Agarkar-led panel already made it very clear that they did not want the batter to get in any leadership role,as they are just seeing him as a specialist batter.

Also Read: India Tour of England: Check out players who missed out on squad selection

Ajit Agarkar-led selection panel had discussion with Jasprit Bumrah about not giving leadership role

For the unversed, the Agarkar-led selection panel also spoke with Jasprit Bumrah about the decision of not giving any leadership role ahead of the squad selection.

“More important to us as a player. Once you’re managing people, there’s a lot that takes out of you. We’ve had a chat with him, he’s okay with it. He knows where his body’s at. KL not really, he’s captained a while back, he’s a quality player and hope he has a big series. With Booms, it was more about his workload management.”

Also Read: India Tour of England: Check out the list of players who received maiden call-ups

India Test Squad For England Series

Shubman Gill (c), Rishabh Pant (wk/vc), Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Sai Sudharsan, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Karun Nair, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Ravindra Jadeja, Dhruv Jurel (wk), Washington Sundar, Shardul Thakur, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Akash Deep, Arshdeep Singh, Kuldeep Yadav.