Former Indian wicket-keeper bat Deep Dasgupta has backed the team management over Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s exclusion for the fifth T20I against New Zealand. Sooryavanshi could only manage four runs off eight balls in the second game while batting at one drop after he replaced injured Ishan Kishan in the final XI.
In the third game, Sooryavanshi was promoted as an opener and smashed 45 runs off just 19 balls. However, when Kishan returned to the team’s playing XI, Sooryavanshi was dropped from the last two games of the series despite India taking an impregnable lead of 3-0 in the series.
Deep Dasgupta said on his YouTube Channel, “Where will Abhishek and Sanju play international cricket after this? They play just one format. They also need match time. So, that becomes an issue. You can give them rest, but you don’t want Abhishek or Sanju, your first-choice opening pair, to lose their form.
“Looking for Vaibhav’s perspective, it’s a good initiation that you are getting a chance to open or bat in the top three, you are with the team, and getting to learn. A very important thing here is the conversation with the coach. I’m sure Gautam will have a long-term plan for someone like Vaibhav, and I’m sure it would have been communicated to Vaibhav.”
Meanwhile, Sooryavanshi didn’t play a single game against the West Indies in the five-match T20I series. In the Asian Games, Sooryavanshi returned with scores of 38 and 15 in the semifinal and final against Sri Lanka and Pakistan respectively.
The youngster had hogged the limelight after he scored 776 runs in 16 matches of IPL 2026 at a blistering strike rate of 237.30 for Rajasthan Royals.
