'No one has supported me': Sarfaraz Khan has heard India's verdict, second-hand

Sarfaraz Khan made 55 for Mumbai against Railways at the Brabourne on Monday, then gave the kind of interview that travels further than a Ranji fifty usually does. Speaking after the first day's play, as reported by ESPNcricinfo, he said he expected a place in the India A squad for New Zealand and didn't get one. Then he explained what he thinks the problem is.

He made India's squad for the two Tests in Sri Lanka in August, as cover for the injured Sai Sudharsan, and didn't play. The useful thing he took from that trip wasn't a cap. It was a piece of dressing-room information about how he's viewed.

Here's the awkward part of that label: India have never tested it. All six of Sarfaraz's Tests were at home, three against England and three against New Zealand. He has never batted in an overseas Test, so the "Indian conditions" tag can't rest on anything he did in one.

The closest thing to evidence is India A, and it's what he reached for on Monday. Cricinfo's count has him at 300 runs at exactly 50 in seven first-class games for India A outside India. That's a respectable return and a fair rebuttal. It also contains three fifties and no hundred, and it's spread across four years. It proves he isn't helpless away from home. It doesn't prove India have the wrong man on the plane.

Buried in the answer is his sharpest argument. Sarfaraz said that a batter who comes back on a rank turner can struggle after piling up domestic runs, and that 30, 40 or 50 can be a real score on that sort of surface. It reads like a defence of November 2024, and the numbers explain why. He opened that New Zealand series with 150 in Bengaluru. He then made 11, 9, 0 and 1 at Pune and the Wankhede, on pitches where Mitchell Santner and Ajaz Patel ran through India.

That cuts against the selectors' reported logic. If he's a home specialist, his last memory of home conditions is 21 runs in four innings on the surfaces India tend to prepare. If he isn't, the only way to find out is to send him somewhere else. Being kept for Indian conditions, and out of the Indian side in them, is a hard position to bat your way out of.

The "no one has supported me" line is already the headline elsewhere, and it's a big thing to say out loud. It's also unprovable and a little unfair to the people who gave him a Test debut, a recall and an Irani Cup vice-captaincy. Read it as an honest account of how the last two years have felt, not as a charge sheet.

The more revealing detail is the 20kg. He went from 97kg to 77kg, and he says nobody in the India or Mumbai setups asked him to. He acted on what he heard on social media and from other people, and he admits he was overweight. So the man has now rebuilt his body in response to chatter, and is trying to read his Test future from chatter too. That's a poor way for a 29-year-old with 18 first-class hundreds to learn where he stands.

Last month Wasim Jaffer suggested the reason for the omission could be beyond cricket. Sarfaraz has now offered a much duller explanation, and it's a cricketing one: a conditions-based judgement nobody bothered to tell him about. If that's the real reason, it's defensible and badly communicated. Selectors don't owe anyone a place. A sentence would be cheap, though.

Meanwhile India A are in New Zealand as a shadow tour before the Tests later this month, with Sudharsan, the man he covered for in Sri Lanka, among the batters there. Sarfaraz has his routine at Azad Maidan and Cross Maidan and, by his own account, a 5am alarm he questions most mornings. His position is simple enough: selection is in their hands, and his job is to play. It's a fine attitude. It still isn't an answer to the question he asked.