In normal circumstances, Vijay Shankar would've been taking the field for Sunrisers Hyderabad in the 13th edition of the Indian Premier League. However, with the country currently in lockdown due to the spread of novel coronavirus, the Indian all-rounder took part in an Instagram live session with SRH captain David Warner to talk about his life in cricket and beyond.
During the session, Warner asked Shankar as to why he switched from bowling spin bowling to medium-pace early in his career.
“I was not able to get into my domestic team when I was the spinner, I used to score runs but I did not manage to get into the side. Then I started bowling medium pace, and things really changed for me,” Shankar told Warner.
Earlier, too, Shankar had said that there were many spinners in his domestic team, which led him to switch to pace bowling.
"We had a lot of spinners like Malo (Malolan Rangarajan), (Baba) Aparajith, Aushik (Srinivas) and Rahil (Shah), so everybody advised me to start bowling medium-pace, because there weren’t too medium-pace bowling all-rounders around. So it began, and fortunately there were a lot of people around me, like my brother, father and coach H Balaji to help me make the required adjustments,” Shankar had told Indian Express.
Vijay Shankar last appeared for India in the 2019 World Cup. His campaign in the tournament was cut-short due to a toe injury while batting during the nets. He has failed to make a comeback to the side since.
Even as India's first-choice all-rounder Hardik Pandya spent a majority of time outside the cricket field with injury, Shivam Dube was preferred over Shankar in limited-overs format.
In the previous edition of the IPL, Shankar produced a rather underwhelming performance. He played in 15 matches, scoring 244 runs while taking only one wicket. Overall, he has played 33 IPL games, scoring 557 runs at a strike-rate of 133.89. He has two wickets to his name in the tournament, having bowled 14 overs.
