Ishan Kishan, who was recently dropped from BCCI’s central contract list, had secretary Jay Shah chatting up with him on Sunday evening after Mumbai Indians’ IPL game, a gesture which could be viewed as silver lining for the maverick wicketkeeper-batter.
The 25-year-old from Jharkhand, who returned to India in the middle of the South Africa tour last year, citing travel fatigue, has been reluctant to play first class cricket.
He didn’t feature in a single Ranji Trophy game this season despite being sent repeated feelers by the Indian team management.
Instead, he was seen practising with his MI skipper Hardik Pandya in Baroda, gearing up for the IPL. He even ignored instructions to play Jharkhand’s last Ranji Trophy game against Rajasthan, leading to the loss of contract.
While he recently made a comeback for RBI in the DY Patil T20 Cup, his return to top-flight cricket started on an indifferent note as he was dismissed for a duck against Gujarat Titans.
However, Shah was seen having a light-hearted chat with Kishan and national captain Rohit Sharma. While the contents of the discussion are not known, the all-powerful secretary warming up to a cricketer, who had fallen out of favour, certainly augurs well for the latter.
Kishan’s chances of a comeback in the T20 World Cup have dwindled in the past few months with Rishabh Pant back in contention and KL Rahul also making his intentions clear by picking up the big gloves.
To add to that, Sanju Samson has also started off the IPL well while Dhruv Jurel and Jitesh Sharma are also in the mix for the coveted spot in the national team.
But IPL gives Kishan a massive opportunity to make a case with consistent performances with selectors travelling for select games to check on World Cup hopefuls.
The best part about Secretary Shah’s short little conversation was the presence of national captain Rohit, which effectively meant that Kishan would be judged by the yardstick of his performance even though his attitude had come under the scanner in the past few months.
MI batting coach Kieron Pollard also threw his weight behind the embattled opener and said he will come good in the coming matches as he is an “experienced” player within the setup.
“For him, again, he did not score tonight so, we can look at all sorts of different things, but it’s a long tournament, he is an experienced guy within our setup and we expect big things from Ishan,” Pollard said.
“He is in a good space, he has been practising well and has been doing fairly decently, so hopefully within the next couple of games, you can see great performances from him and all of you will continue to laud his brains when he does that,” Pollard said.