It remains a goal for any player to represent his country and help his side win the match, bagging the Man of the Match award is cheery on the cake. Doing it for the Indian team makes it one of the most difficult tasks in world cricket because of the huge amount of competition.
Such is the competition and tussle for every single spot in the Indian cricket team that there have been instances when a player has been dropped even after receiving the Man of the Match award.
Here are 3 Indian players who were dropped from the side despite winning the Man of the Match award in the previous game:
Kuldeep Yadav
Kuldeep Yadav was harshly done by the Indian team management last year in the Test series in Bangladesh. In the first Test of the series in Chattogram, Kuldeep produced a match-winning performance, returning with figures of 5/40 and 3/73 and also scoring 40 runs with the bat.
However, he was shockingly dropped from the next Test match, in Dhaka, where India picked Unadkat after seeing that there was some grass left on the pitch. Although India won the match by only 3 wickets and Unadkat did well, axing Kuldeep Yadav after such a performance was unfair.
Amit Mishra
Talking about unfair treatment, nobody would have been more frustrated than Amit Mishra when he was dropped from the ODI team in the very next match, and series, after picking up a five-wicket haul in his last ODI, bagging the Man of the Match and the Man of the Series award.
In Amit Mishra’s last ODI match, against New Zealand in October 2016, under MS Dhoni’s captaincy, Mishra returned with match-winning figures of 5/18, and was the Man of the Series as well for picking 15 wickets in the series.
However, at the start of 2017, when Virat Kohli took the white-ball captaincy, Mishra was dropped from the team and was never picked again. It seems like Kohli didn’t believe Mishra to be a long-term prospect. This exclusion of the in-form veteran leg-spinner, just on the basis of his age, is very baffling.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar
Bhuvneshwar Kumar also had the terrible fate of not just being dropped, but never playing a Test match again after bagging the Man of the Match award in his last Test match. Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s last Test match came in January 2018, where he won India the Johannesburg Test with both his batting and bowling: he returned with bowling figures of 3/44 and 1/39 while managing scores of 30 and 33 in a low-scoring thriller.
However, his fitness didn’t allow him to play any more Test match till date. That year, he was selected for the Test series in England, but got injured before the series started. Since then his body hasn’t gotten up to managing the workloads of bowling in a Test match. He also hasn’t played any red-ball domestic match since then.
