Suryakumar Yadav, who is captain of India’s T20I team for the five-match series against Australia that starts today, was surprised that only two media showed up to the press conference on Wednesday before the series. Today in Visakhapatnam is the first game in the round-robin.
It was only three days ago that Australia won their sixth ODI World Cup title in Ahmedabad. Now, India and Australia are back in action.
And it looks like everyone who played or wrote about the big game over the past six weeks is tired. So, surprisingly few people showed up to Yadav’s news conference before the show.
“Only two people?” he asked. After the five T20Is against Australia, Yadav will be in charge of the team. He smiled and laughed like always before finishing the four-minute press briefing.
Most of the time, the BCCI media manager has to pick which reporters to talk to. On Wednesday, they didn’t have to do that.
In the same way, it looks like the talk with the reporters before the series with Australia’s captain Matthew Wade did not happen. It’s not clear if it was because not many reporters showed up.
India put together a pretty much different team for the game. Five places will host the games, with the last one on December 3 in Bengaluru.
Indian will be led by Yadav for the first time since Rohit Sharma isn’t playing. Only three players from India’s World Cup team have been kept. Ishan Kishan and Prasidh Krishna are the other two.
Earlier, Australia wicketkeeper and batter Alex Carey said it was “odd scheduling” that the series was set up so soon after the World Cup.
When Carey got back to Adelaide, he told the media, “We’ve all gone our separate ways. The T20s are coming up, and some guys are on planes right now going home.”
He stated: “It’s probably pretty odd scheduling now that you look at it, to win a World Cup and a few days later you’re playing again.”
Michael Vaughan was more direct than Carey when he said that the series was “complete greed and overkill” when he heard that India and Australia would be playing each other again so soon.