The Duleep Trophy, which opens India's 2024-25 domestic season, is set to kick off on September 5 in Bengaluru and Anantapur, with a number of big names featuring. With the Test squad for the home series against Bangladesh set to be picked later this week, there's an opportunity for those on the fringes to impress the Ajit Agarkar-led selection panel as they look to shortlist players for India A tour of Australia in November, which shadows the senior team's five-Test tour of the country.
Here are a few things to look forward to.
Who is the next reserve opener?
Barring injury and illness, Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal are likely to be India's first-choice opening combination for the moment. Shubman Gill currently occupies the No. 3 spot, while KL Rahul has expressed his preference to bat in the middle order. Both have opened in the past, however, and can slot back in at the top if temporarily needed.
But there's plenty at stake for the domestic openers on the fringes. On top of the list are Bengal's Abhimanyu Easwaran and Karnataka's Devdutt Padikkal, who made his debut against England earlier this year in Dharamsala, albeit in the middle order.
Easwaran is largely old-school and copybook and has scored 7006 first-class runs at an average of 47.65 in a decade-long career so far. He's been on tours with the national team previously and has led India A, but the Test cap has been elusive.
Padikkal, meanwhile, started off as an opener but has carved a niche at No. 3 over the past year. But with R Samarth having left Karnataka, it's likely Padikkal will be back at the top of the order for his state side. Padikkal scored 556 runs in six Ranji Trophy innings at 92.66 in 2023-24, including three hundreds. A strong follow-up to start 2024-25 will keep him in the mix.
Another contender who has impressed the selection committee with his temperament is Tamil Nadu's B Sai Sudharsan. While the left-hand batter plays at No. 3 or 4 for his state side, he is open to batting at the top. He began his ODI career with back-to-back half-centuries as an opener late last year in South Africa.
Sudharsan will come into the Duleep Trophy fresh off a century for Surrey in the County Championship.
A crowded list of middle-order candidates
The Test series against England earlier this year featured a number of impressive performances from new faces in the middle order, particularly Sarfaraz Khan, who made three half-centuries in his first five Test innings, and Dhruv Jurel, who won the Player of the Match award with a pair of brilliant knocks in only his second Test. But they could find themselves crowded out by the imminent returns of Virat Kohli and Rishabh Pant, who both missed the series. Rahul, who missed the last four Tests with injury, is likely to slot right back too.
If all of them are fit, India could opt for a top seven of Rohit, Jaiswal, Gill, Kohli, Rahul, Pant and Ravindra Jadeja in the first Test against Bangladesh in Chennai. Jurel will likely be the reserve wicketkeeper, which leaves Sarfaraz and Shreyas Iyer - who was dropped after the first two Tests against England - in a fight to squeeze into the squad.
All this adds extra spice to the opening-round Duleep fixtures. Apart from Sarfaraz, Jurel and Iyer, other middle-order candidates who could be in action include Rajat Patidar, who endured a difficult Test initiation against England, and B Indrajith, who has been knocking for a few seasons now. Earlier this year, after being left out of the Tamil Nadu squad initially, he was instrumental in the team's stirring run to the semi-final. Across 111 first-class innings, he averages 53.85 with 16 hundreds.
The search for India's next set of spinners
For more than a decade now, R Ashwin and Jadeja have been constants in the Test set-up. Over the past couple of years, Kuldeep Yadav and Axar Patel have pushed themselves ahead of the chasing pack to establish themselves as the next spinners in line.
Beneath the cream, there's a healthy crop of upcoming left-arm spinners. R Sai Kishore, the highest wicket-taker of the 2023-24 Ranji season (53), and Saurabh Kumar are high up in the pecking order. But the selectors are also looking keenly at the old-school Manav Suthar from Rajasthan who finds himself in the NCA's targeted pool of players.
The 22-year-old Suthar has picked up 55 wickets over the past two Ranji seasons and has been part of the India Emerging (for the Asia Cup) and India A (against England Lions) squads.
Among the offspinners, Washington Sundar is the frontrunner, having already shown his utility as an allrounder in his brief but impressive spell in the Test side in 2020-21. He's made a splash in white-ball cricket more recently, having been named Player of the Series in the T20I series in Zimbabwe for his eight wickets in five games at an average of 11.62, and following that up with decent returns during the limited-overs tour of Sri Lanka. He'll hope to translate that form into red-ball cricket.
The other offspinner the selectors have been keen on looking at is Delhi's Hrithik Shokeen. The 24-year-old is only two seasons old in first-class cricket and has so far picked up 30 wickets in 10 games at 33.93. He, like Washington, is more than useful with the bat as well, as he has shown with two fifties and an average of 32.16 so far in his first-class career. He has also been to the UK on an exchange program with Mumbai Indians.
The fast-bowling reserves
India's search for a left-arm fast bowler post Zaheer Khan hasn't yet yielded a long-term solution, at least in Test cricket. Arshdeep Singh is a T20I regular now, but his challenge is to show he can sustain the intensity of red-ball cricket: he has only played 16 first-class games so far, and averages 31.97. Khaleel Ahmed, who has endured a stop-start career thanks to injury, has also played very little first-class cricket: just 12 games in seven years, while averaging 35.00.
These two are set to feature in the Duleep Trophy, as is Uttar Pradesh's Yash Dayal, who can swing the new ball both ways and has impressed India's team management with his skills. He has picked up 72 wickets in 23 first-class games at 29.26, and has come into the limelight on the back of a stellar IPL 2024 for Royal Challengers Bengaluru.
Among right-arm quicks, the Bengal pair of Akash Deep and Mukesh Kumar will hope to build on their impressive Test initiations, while Avesh Khan, who has an excellent first-class record - 165 wickets in 43 games at 22.49 - will hope he can find a way to break into the Test side having been in and around the white-ball set-up for a while. Prasidh Krishna, meanwhile, is finally fit again after two years of run-ins with injuries either side of a lacklustre debut Test series in South Africa.
With a long Test season about to begin, India will want to make sure they have the right back-ups in place for the lead Test trio of Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj.