India A squad for West Indies tour

Hrishikesh Kanitkar will lead a 15 member India A team to tour West Indies, Gagan Khoda will be his deputy. The visit is a reciprocal one following the tour by the West Indies A of this country last year.

Some of the players who stood a chance of being picked in the Indian team for the Australian tour - Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Amit Bhandari, Dodda Ganesh and Jacob Martin - have been accomodated in the squad for the West Indies tour. But there are some glaring omissions like Mumbai's Amol Muzumdar and Saurashtra's Sitanshu Kotak. Only last month, Muzumdar was the India A captain for the match against New Zealand in Pune. Kotak had amassed a lot of runs in the West zone Ranji Trophy league and super league matches and just last month had hit a century against the strong Karnataka attack of Srinath, Ganesh, Kumble and Joshi for the Rest of India team in the Irani Trophy game. Among other notable omissions are Ashish Nehra who was good enough to play a Test match in the Asian Test championship in Colombo in February and the consistent Virender Sehwag.

The squad: Hrishikesh Kanitkar (captain), Gagan Khoda (vice captain), J.Arun Kumar, Pravanjan Mullick, Jacob Martin, Devendra Bundela, Md Kaif, Sameer Dighe (wicketkeeper), Rahul Sanghvi, S.Sriram, Dodda Ganesh, Harvinder Singh Sodhi, Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Amit Bhandari and Murali Karthik.