India vs South Africa: 3 reasons why India are favourite against South Africa
India (Image Source: BCCI)
Team India is scheduled to play against South Africa in a five-match home T20I series starting from today (9 June) onwards. Team India will look to win their 13th consecutive match in this shortest format of the game. On the other hand, South Africa will look to try and test some new players and combinations ahead of this year’s mega-event in Australia.
Team India rested big names like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli for this series. However, the Team India management showed faith in young and promising talents like Umran Malik and Arshdeep Singh for their recent outings in the Indian T20 Leauge 2022. Some Proteas like Quinton de Kock, David Miller, and Kagiso Rabada are also coming off a good form in this series.
Meanwhile, Team India faced an early setback as KL Rahul got ruled out on 8 June due to an injury. Therefore, captaincy duties got shifted to Rishabh Pant while Hardik Pandya was named as his deputy. Still, there are three main reasons for which India can manage to win this series fair and square. Here are the reasons:
Inclusion of Hardik Pandya
Eyebrows were raised when the new franchise, Gujarat announced Hardik Pandya as their captain for this year’s Indian T20 Leauge 2022. He was coming back from an injury setback and he had no game time in his belt. However, he proved his all critics wrong by leading his troops to win this tournament in their maiden appearance.
Personally, he had a great tournament with both the bat and ball. He scored 487 runs in 15 innings at an average of 44.27 with a strike rate over 130. He also picked eight wickets in 10 matches. In this year’s final, he was the player of the match for his all-round show (three crucial wickets and 34 runs off 30 balls while chasing.
