By Pragati Saha
Indian all-rounder Axar Patel has been ruled out from the rest of the series against the Proteas due to his illness, Shahbaz Ahmed has been chosen as his substitute.
BCCI stated, “ He (Axar) is with the team in Lucknow, (the location for the fourth T20I), where he will undergo further medical evaluation”. Axar even missed the 3rd T20 match which was scheduled in Dharamshala. Along with him even Jasprit Bumrah also missed that match due to his personal reasons. India introduced Kuldeep Yadav and Harshit Rana as substitutes and they won the match by seven wickets.
In the ongoing T20 series, he had an average performance in the first two matches, In the first match, he scored 23 runs from 21 balls and took 2 wickets by giving 7 runs where India won the match. In the second match, he took 1 wicket by giving 27 runs in three overs and while India was chasing the runs he managed to score just 21 runs at one run per ball. In the following match he was moved up to the 3rd position.
Till now, Shahbaz had played only three ODIs and T20Is matches for India. He last played a tournament during the final match of the Asian games against Afghanistan in Hangzhou. While playing matches for Bengal in the current Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy he delivered a decent performance. He managed to have 60 runs in five matches at a strike rate of 133.33 and claimed 8 wickets at an economy rate of 8.25.
After the 4th T20I match takes place in Lucknow, both the teams will travel to Ahmedabad for the last match of the series, India is currently the five-match series with 2-1.
India’s updated squad for the rest of the series: Suryakumar Yadav (c) , Shubman Gill (vc), Abhishek Sharma, Tilak Varma, Hardik Pandya, Shivam Dube, Jitesh Sharma (wk), Sanju Samson (wk), Jasprit Bumrah, Varun Chakravarthy, Arshdeep Singh, Kuldeep Yadav, Washington Sundar, Harshit Rana, Shahbaz Ahmed