India finally announced their squad for the upcoming tour to England where they will play five Test matches against the Three Lions, which marks the beginning of their campaign in the World Test Championship (WTC) 2025-27 cycle. India will be without the services of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, who recently retired from the longest format. Hence, there have been a lot of young faces who have been selected in the squad. However, Sarfaraz Khan, who has been part of India's Test team in the recent past, has not been selected in the side.

At the press conference where the squad was announced, chief selector Ajit Agarkar indicated that they picked Karun Nair over Sarfaraz Khan. This is because in the absence of Virat Kohli, the team needed some experience in the middle order, and Nair fit the bill perfectly.

He also stated that Sarfaraz has not been consistent with the chances he got. After scoring a century in the first Test vs New Zealand at home, he did not get enough runs.

“Sometimes you just have to make good decisions. Sarfaraz, I know he got a 100 in the first Test (against New Zealand) and then didn’t get runs. Sometimes these are decisions the team management takes. At the moment, Karun has scored heaps of runs in domestic, has played a bit of Test cricket, played a bit of county cricket. With Virat not there, clearly we’re lacking a bit of experience. We felt his experience could help,” Agarkar said.

Shubman Gill (c), Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant (vc, wk), Dhruv Jurel (wk), Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Sai Sudharsan, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Karun Nair, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar, Shardul Thakur, Arshdeep Singh