The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 will be held in Australia this year, and therefore the Indian National Cricket Team left for Australia from Mumbai in the early hours of Thursday, October 6. BCCI shared a picture of the players and support staff posing for the group photograph just before the team's departure from the airport. The World Cup will start on October 16 with the qualifying round matches, and then the Super 12s will kick off on October 22.
The Indian team will play its first game against arch-rivals Pakistan on October 23 at Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in a repeat of last year’s T20 World Cup opener for both teams. The team has gone to Australia two weeks before the world cup so that they get familiar with the conditions well in advance. Most of the players who have been selected and haven’t had the experience of playing in Australia before, so practising there will help them understand the pitch conditions as well as they will get used to it.
Currently, only 14 players have gone to Australia as the BCCI is yet to announce a substitute player for the injured Jasprit Bumrah, who has been ruled out of the upcoming mega event due to a back injury, but it is being said that either Mohammed Shami or Deepak Chahar would take his place.
Apart from the 14 players that left for Australia on Thursday, the others such as Shreyas Iyer, Deepak Chahar, and Ravi Bishnoi, along with Mohammed Shami, will visit Australia next week after the conclusion of the ODI series against South Africa. The quartet has been selected as the four reserve players for the T20 World Cup. Additionally, it has been reported that Mohammed Siraj, Umran Malik, Chetan Sakariya, and Mukesh Choudhary are also supposed to join the side as additional players.
"Only 7,8 members of the squad have been to Australia, so we have organized a few practice games. We need to understand what combination we can play. Bumrah is out of the World Cup, so we need to find a bowler who has experience bowling in Australia. Not sure who that bowler is going to be, we will see once we travel to Australia, we'll find it out there," said Captain Rohit Sharma.
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