Sunil Gavaskar has come out in defense of Prithvi Shaw who was recently dropped from the Mumbai Ranji squad. The 24-year-old batter was omitted from the squad owing to fitness reasons.
Mumbai travelled to Agartala for the third round of the ongoing 2024-25 Ranji Trophy to face Tripura. They drew the game but collected more points by virtue of first innings lead.
Shaw did not have the best of starts to the current red-ball season. He has scored 139 runs in six innings and averages 27.8 with just one half-century. He was then dropped from the squad with an MCA official confirming to the Indian Express that he needed to ‘shed some body weight’. In fact, there was a report from the MCA which stated that Shaw has 35% body fat and needs to be involved in some rigorous training in order to be considered once again.
Gavaskar has criticized the Mumbai selectors for this approach. He cited the example of Sarfaraz Khan who recently smashed 150 against New Zealand in Bangalore. The India batting legend feels if it is about attitude or discipline, then Shaw’s exclusion is understandable but not if it’s only because of body weight.
“There have been mixed reports about his omission from the Ranji team. If it’s about his attitude, approach and discipline, then it’s understandable, but hopefully, it is nothing to do with his weight as one report seems to have suggested. That report suggested that he had 35 per cent more body fat. We have seen in the previous Test in Bengaluru how another player Sarfaraz Khan, whose weight and shape have also been discussed in the public domain, played a scintillating innings of 150, showing that it is not the shape or the size of your waist that determines cricket fitness,” Sunil Gavaskar wrote in his column on Mid-Day.
Shaw and his inconsistent performances
Shaw has the tendency to make one big score every season. He smashed a record-breaking 379 in the 2022-23 Ranji season against Assam. Last season, he got 159 against Chhattisgarh. However, there have been a string of poor performances on either side of those big scores. He even played five County Championship (Division 2) games this year, scoring 164 runs in nine innings. The Mumbai-born batter did well in the Royal London One-Day Cup. He amassed 343 runs in eight games while striking at 117.86.
Shaw’s last India appearance came back in 2021. His last Test match was in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2020-21 while his last white-ball appearance came in July 2021 in Sri Lanka.
