The players of the Indian cricket team left directly from the United Arab Emirates after participating in the 13th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) there. Team India were seen in PPE kits in images shared by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
Batsman Cheteshwar Pujara, who did not play in the IPL this season, also posed with the rest of the players in the images along with head coach Ravi Shastri.
India’s tour of Australia will kick off with the ODI series from November 27. It will be followed by the three-match T20I series from December 4 before the gruelling Test series begins from December 17. The red-ball assignments will end on January 19 if the fourth Test is played across all the five days.
The first Test at Adelaide will be India’s first day-night Test outside home soil. It will also be skipper Virat Kohli’s only appearance in all-whites in Australia this time as he would return to India on a paternity leave after the opener.
Kohli had already informed the BCCI about his wish to return to India to unite with his wife Anushka Sharma. They are expecting their first child in January next year.
Meanwhile, limited-overs vice-captain Rohit Sharma did not travel with the rest of the members. Due to his exclusion from the white-ball squad, Rohit would travel to Australia before the Test series.
Rohit, who was initially left out of all the three Indian squads for the Australia tour, was included in the team for the Test series at the last moment. He had suffered an injury during the recently-concluded IPL.
Squads:
India T20I: Virat Kohli (captain), Shikhar Dhawan, Mayank Agarwal, KL Rahul (vice-captain and wicket-keeper), Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Hardik Pandya, Sanju Samson (wicket-keeper), Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar, Yuzvendra Chahal, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Navdeep Saini, Deepak Chahar, Varun Chakravarthy
India ODI: Virat Kohli (captain), Shikhar Dhawan, Shubman Gill, KL Rahul (vice-captain and wicket-keeper), Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Hardik Pandya, Mayank Agarwal, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Navdeep Saini, Shardul Thakur
India Test: Virat Kohli (captain), Mayank Agarwal, Prithvi Shaw, KL Rahul, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane (vice-captain), Rohit Sharma, Hanuma Vihari, Shubman Gill, Wriddhiman Saha and Rishabh Pant (wicket-keepers), Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, Navdeep Saini, Kuldeep Yadav, Ravindra Jadeja, R. Ashwin, Mohammed Siraj