Hanuma Vihari, 24 year old makes his debut for India at Kia Oval on a day where all the focus is on Alastair Cook who plays his last international game for England. Vihari becomes 292nd player to represent India in Test cricket, picked ahead of Karun Nair who has been part of the team from the one-off match against Afghanistan but couldn’t make it to the playing eleven in any of the matches so far -have to feel for the Karnataka batsman.
Vihari, a fine middle order right-hand batsman who received his maiden call-up to the Test squad in place of Kuldeep Yadav after the third test match. His strong first-class performances speak for his selection in one of the toughest away tours for India. He holds a healthy first-class average of 59.79 with the highest score of 302*and 15 hundreds in 63 matches so far. Well, he is also a handy right arm off-break bowler too. We can expect him to contribute with his bowling and provide some breakthrough in the later part of the test match which Kohli will be looking for.
India had made one other change as R Jadeja coming in for Ashwin. With Pandya being dropped, India is playing with only four specialist bowlers in this test match. Joe Root has won the toss again – the fifth time in this series and opted to bat first. England started slowly seeing off the first hour without losing any wickets.
For now, he has to wait for few more hours before he gets to face his first ball International Test Cricket. Let’s wish him all the very best for a long international career and play many exceptional innings for Team India.
