Shreyas, Siraj included in T20 squad

Mumbai: Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced the squad for upcoming New Zealand T20 series with Shreyas Iyer and Mohammed Siraj the new faces coming in.

Ashish Nehra has been picked for only the first T20, to be played in Delhi, which will be his last game before retiring. The T20 series begins on November 1 and will see the two sides play three T20s.

Iyer comes into the side on the back of strong performances for India-A against New Zealand-A where he scored 317 runs in four matches with scores of 108 runs, 82 runs, 90 runs and 37 runs.

Prior to that, he finished as the third highest run-getter in South Africa in the tri-series involving the hosts and Afghanistan A. It included a match winning 140 runs from 131 balls to clinch the series.

India T20 squad: Virat Kohli (capt), Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Manish Pandey, Shreyas Iyer, Dinesh Karthik (wk), MS Dhoni (wk), Hardik Pandya, Axar Patel, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj, Ashish Nehra (only for first T20I)

The selectors also retained KL Rahul for the series after being dropped from the ongoing three-match ODI series against New Zealand. Dinesh Karthik, who was named in the T20 squad against Australia, has also been retained.

In the spin department, the selectors continue to persist with Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal and Axar Patel while Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja – who have been included for Sri Lanka Tests – have once again not been considered.