One of the finest opening batters India has produced in the last 10-15 years, Shikhar Dhawan didn’t have the finest of exits from the team. Despite delivering consistently in the white-ball cricketing spectrum, Dhawan suddenly found himself surplus to requirements in the early 2020s. His exit from Test cricket was already sealed in 2018 but soon nailing a spot in the white-ball teams also started becoming difficult. In an interview, Dhawan has opened up on the nature of his departure from the team.
Dhawan thought that he would be picked in India’s 2021 T20 World Cup squad. But, when a call-up didn’t come, he didn’t even bother calling anyone in the team or the selection committee. The disappointment was there, but Dhawan decided to move on.
“I knew that my name was not going to come. I could sense that thing. It’s not that you are going to be spoon-fed for everything,” Dhawan said in a chat with Hindustan Times. He “never bothered to call anyone” after the T20 World Cup squad came out. “I didn’t ask anyone why my name didn’t come. Even if I had asked, they were going to have their own perspective on it and I am going to tell my own story. It doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t change anything.”
When it comes to ODIs, Dhawan wasn’t even considered for the 2023 World Cup at home while his long-term teammates Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma made the cut. When asked if he deserved a batter exit, Dhawan said what Shubman Gill was doing at that time, made it difficult for the selectors to pick him.
“Now there is one angle of seeing it that way. Another angle is that at the time, Shubman Gill was doing very well in T20s and Tests as well. Now I am not in the picture that much. I only come for ODIs. But the other player is doing so well and he is in front of the coaches more. He is creating his own aura or own environment authentically, organically,” he said.
It wasn’t that runs had completely dried off Dhawan’s bat. He was getting 50s and 70s but the big numbers had stopped flowing. When the southpaw saw Ishan Kishan score a double century in an ODI, he knew that his career was definitely over.
“I was scoring lots of 50s, I didn’t score a 100 but I scored lots of 70s. When Ishan Kishan scored that 200, my instinct told me, alright boy, this can be the end of your career. An inner voice came to me. And that’s what happened. Then I remember my friends came over to you know, give me that emotional support. They thought that I would be very down. But I was chilling, I was enjoying,” Dhawan said.
When asked if any of his teammates got in touch with him over the snub, the former India batter said that he did have a chat with the then-head coach Rahul Dravid.
“No, it doesn’t happen that way. Maybe I spoke to Rahul (Dravid) Bhai. He messaged me. Everyone has their own journey and they are doing work or they are on tours, that’s something very normal. We are used to it from the age of under 14, this is not the first time I am getting dropped or getting in,” he added.
