5 opening partners for Rohit Sharma in the Champions Trophy

#5 Manish Pandey

Can Virat Kohli do a MS Dhoni and make Manish Pandey open?

Two of India’s biggest positives from the series should be Yuvraj Singh getting back to his groove and Kedar Jadhav’s promising performance at number 6. These two came at the expense of Manish Pandey, who was been in and out of the Indian team for a while now. One cannot forget Pandey’s match-winning century against the Australians at Sydney in 2016. It won’t be fair if he is dropped from the team after an average series against New Zealand.

If Kohli decides to do a Dhoni and make Manish open the innings with Rohit Sharma, this will roll back the years and take us to 2013 where Dhoni asked Rohit to open the innings with Dhawan, in spite of having Murali Vijay in the squad. This won’t be the first time he will be opening the innings as the Karnataka batsman has already opened the innings for his former IPL team, Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2009 and 2010.

Though this is unlikely to happen, India might be forced to open with Pandey if any of the opener gets injured and the team management doesn’t trust the third opener in the squad or the selectors go in with an extra bowler instead of a third opener.