Agarwal earns ODI call-up, Dhawan to miss West Indies series

Agarwal’s inclusion has come about as a result of Shikhar Dhawan’s failure to recover in time from a knee injury, which he sustained while playing for Delhi during the 2019-20 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. The injury has also kept him out of the T20I series against the 2016 world champions.

"While Dhawan's stitches are off and his wound is healing gradually, he still needs some more time before he regains full match fitness," a BCCI release said on Wednesday, 11 December.

Agarwal has had a breakout international season, starting with his debut in last year’s Boxing Day Test against Australia, which he marked with a 76 in his maiden innings at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He followed it up with 77 in the fourth Test in Sydney, as India won a Test series in Australia for the very first time. He got a call-up to the World Cup squad when Vijay Shankar picked up an injury, but didn't feature in a match.

In the ongoing home season, he has taken his performances to the next level. He has scored three centuries in six Test innings, two of them double tons. He also made an unbeaten 55-ball 69 in Karnataka’s title-clinching victory over Tamil Nadu in the Vijay Hazare Trophy final in Bengaluru in October, while his century for India C in the Deodhar Trophy helped seal a massive 232-run victory.

Uncapped at the ODI level, Agarwal has played 79 List A games in which he’s made 3869 runs at 50.90, with 13 hundreds and a best of 176. The three-match ODI series against West Indies begins on 15 December, with the first match taking place in Chennai.

Squad: Virat Kohli (c), Rohit Sharma, Mayank Agarwal, KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Rishabh Pant (wk), Shivam Dube, Kedar Jadhav, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Deepak Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Bhuvneshwar Kumar