The Jharkhandi has been playing near non-stop cricket for a long time now, his only break coming during the five-match one-day series in the Caribbean in mid-June. India have a hectic schedule ahead of them after the England series -- which involves five 50-over games and a Twenty20 international -- and it is likely that Krishnamachari Srikkanth and his colleagues will give Dhoni some time off.
Should Dhoni be rested, then Gautam Gambhir -- fully recovered from the concussion that cut short his England tour -- will take over the captaincy. The Hyderabad game will be India’s first international on home turf since the World Cup final in Mumbai on April 2.
The England series also allows the Indians an opportunity for immediate redemption following their forgettable tour of Old Blighty, which saw them routed 4-0 in the Test series, lose the T20 international and go down 0-3 in the one-day series. India will once again not have a full complement of players to choose from. The selectors are expected to initially name the squad only for the first two games, and it is more or less certain that Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh and Rohit Sharma, who all returned prematurely from England with different injuries.
Pacers Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel are definitely ruled out, while the selectors will debate long and hard on the status of opening batsman Virender Sehwag, who was rushed into national duty in England and was forced to embarrassedly fly back home with shoulder and ear related problems.
Given the large injuy list, the focus will once again be on the younger guns, of whom Ajinkya Rahane, Parthiv Patel and Ravindra Jadeja in particular impressed in England. The lack of experience in the ranks will be rectified somewhat by the return of Harbhajan Singh, in whose absence R Ashwin continued to catch the eye in limited-overs international cricket.
