The national selectors, who met for one and half hours to finalise the team here, picked up three specialist spinners including Tamil Nadu spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and Piyush Chawla. Young batsman Rohit Sharma and pacer S. Sreesanth were on Monday omitted from India’s 15-member squad for the upcoming cricket World Cup to be held in the sub-continent from February 19. Tamil Nadu spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and Piyush Chawla were named in the squad to be captained by Mahendra Singh Dhoni and which includes most of the star players like Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. The national selectors, who met for one and half hours to finalise the team here, picked three specialist spinners considering that the high-profile event will be held in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Tendulkar, Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir and Praveen Kumar, who are nursing injuries and have been ruled out of the ongoing one-day series against South Africa, have been included in the squad announced by BCCI Secretary N Srinivasan. Left arm spinner Pragyan Ojha and wicketkeeper batsman Parthiv Patel, who were among the front-runners to make the cut, failed to find a berth.
India included three spinners and dropped Rohit Sharma in their final 15-member squad for the ICC cricket World Cup selected by the five-member selection panel led by K Srikanth in Chennai on Monday. The list of 30 probables were pruned to half and no big star is left out of the final squad for the mega-event starting February 19. The top-seven of the Indian batting-order -- Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Yuvraj Singh, Virat Kohli, Suresh Raina and MS Dhoni -- are in the team as expected and Yusuf Pathan take the all-rounder's berth. The inspirational Zaheer Khan lead the pace attack and his pacer partners will be the trio of Ashish Nehra, Munaf Patel and Praveen Kumar. S Sreesanth and Ishant Sharma failed to make the cut. Harbhajan Singh will spearhead the slow bowling department with Piyush Chawla and R Ashwin as his spin partner. Amit Mishra and Pragyan Ojha were also vying for the slot. Just a day before the selection meeting, doubts have arisen over Sachin Tendulkar's availability after he pulled out of the remainder of the ODI series in South Africa as a precautionary measure after sustaining a hamstring injury during Saturday's second match. But going by indications, the injury is not serious and Tendulkar will be making his sixth World Cup appearance.
India’s World Cup squad: Mahendra Singh Dhoni (captain), Virender Sehwag (vice-captain), Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Yusuf Pathan, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Praveen Kumar, Munaf Patel, R Ashwin, Piyush Chawla.
