List of players who played in last year’s edition and are missing out this year : Shikar Dhawan, Sridharan Sriram, Sunny Singh, Satyajit Parab, Ranadeb Bose, Amit Bhandari, Ravi Kant Shukla, Sreekumar Nair, Neeraj Patel, Dheeraj Jadhav, Shahbaz Nadeem, Manoj Tiwari, J P Yadav, Vidyut Sivaramakrishnan, Yousuf Pathan.

Around this time last year, Jai Prakash Yadav was part of the Indian dressing room. Less than a year later, he finds himself out of the list of top 39 ODI cricketers in the nation. He is 32 and honestly, I really don’t see him being able to make a comeback from here. I feel the same about Sriram too. He is 30 and he has signed up to play for Maharashtra this year, but I doubt the transfer of address from Chennai to Pune would really help his international prospects in any way.

I feel sorry for Shikar Dhawan. I would have picked him ahead of Jaffer as the reserve opener in the Blue team. Dheeraj Jadhav was not long ago in the list of potential Indian openers and he seems to be slowly falling out of favour. Vidyut opened for the India seniors in one of the games in last year’s edition and put on a big score, but I did think he was lucky to get a game then. So, I’m not surprised he is not getting any this year.

Irfan’s brother Yousuf was a last minute addition last year (because Sourav pulled out) and he would be hoping for something like that to happen again. From the family’s point of view, he would just be hoping Irfan would get back to some sort of form with the ball. Given the way the likes of Munaf, Sreesanth and RP have performed in the recent months and given that Nehra and Balaji are back to full fitness, Bhandari and Bose stood absolutely no chance of featuring in any of the squads. RaviKanth, Nadeem and Tiwari are still quite young and I’m sure they will get their chances again. I wasn’t too thrilled with the inclusion of Sunny Singh, Satyajit Parab, Neeraj Patel and Sreekumar Nair last year and I’m not really surprised to see their names missing this time around.

SS Paul didn’t play in the Challengers last year. But he was named in the list of 30 ICC Trophy probables last month. I wonder what made the selectors select him then and ignore him now.