Vijay Hazare Trophy: Rohit Sharma to play in first 2 matches; no Jaiswal, SKY, Dube in Mumbai squad

AHMEDABAD: Former India captain Rohit Sharma will feature in the first two matches for Mumbai in the upcoming Vijay Hazare Trophy. However, India's T20 captain Suryakumar Yadav, opener Yashasvi Jaiswal, and all-rounder Shivam Dube have not been included in Mumbai's squad for the domestic One-Day tournament. The team will be captained by all-rounder Shardul Thakur.

The group stage of VHT will be held between Dec 24, 2025 and January 8, 2026. Mumbai have been placed in Elite Group C, alongside Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Himachal, Maharashtra, Punjab, and Goa, and will play their matches in Jaipur.




"Rohit will play in Mumbai's first two matches of the tournament (against Sikkim on Dec 24, and against Uttarakhand on Dec 26, at Jaipur)," a source in the Mumbai Cricket Association told TOI on Friday. The BCCI has made it mandatory for all current national team players to turn up in at least two matches of the Vijay Hazare Trophy, unless a player is injured or recovering from injury at CoE. Earlier, it emerged that former India captain Virat Kohli too will turn out in VHT for Delhi.

"All the India players will be accommodated in the Mumbai squad as and when they are available," Mumbai's senior selection committee chairman Sanjay Patil told this paper, after his panel picked the squad for the tournament on Friday. Also present in the selection meeting was former India skipper Dilip Vengsarkar, currently the MCA's men's cricket advisor.

Jaiswal, India's Test and ODI opener, was hospitalized in Pune after suffering from a bout of acute gastroenteritis after Mumbai's last match in the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy against Rajasthan. "He will be included in the Mumbai squad once he gets clearance from the medical team," Patil said.

India play their next international series starting with the three-match ODI series against New Zealand from Jan 11, 2026 in Vadodara.

Meanwhile, it's learnt that former India and Mumbai captain Ajinkya Rahane has asked to be rested from the initial matches Mumbai team in the league stage of the tournament. "He has got a hamstring issue, and will rest and recover. He will join the Mumbai team after the first couple of matches," Patil said.

The selectors have given a maiden call-up to opener Ishan Mulchandani. Young batter Angkrish Raghuvanshi, who managed to score just 49 runs in four matches@16.33 in the recently-held Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy, was lucky to survive the axe. Prolific domestic batter Sarfaraz Khan, who was in sizzling form in SMAT, hammering 329 runs in seven matches at an average of 65.80 and a strike rate of 203.80, including three fifties and a century, is apart of the squad, and so is his younger brother, allrounder Musheer Khan.

Though Mumbai failed to defend their SMAT title, failing to advance beyond the Super League Stage, Patil was quite pleased with the team's performance in the T20 tournament. "I'm quite happy with our performance. We won eight out of our 10 matches, which means that we played some good cricket. Everyone played well, especially Sarfaraz Khan. It's just that we suffered badly due to the Net Run Rate Rule," Patil said. Mumbai won two out of their three matches in the Super League stage, but crashed out as their NRR was inferior to the other teams.

According to the rules of the tournament, the NRR was counted from scratch for the Super League. And, after three Super League games, if multiple teams were on equal points, then instead of looking at the head-to-head figures, the NRR was taken into consideration.