Jafer Chohan released from the England senior side to manage workload ahead of a busy and long season in winter.
Jafer Chohan, the Yorkshire legspinner, is to return home from England’s white-ball tour of the Caribbean.
Instead, the team management decided to reduce his workload in preparation for the upcoming Lions tour of South Africa.
Chohan, 22, became the first South Asian Cricket Academy graduate to be included in an England side, making history. Chohan’s opportunity with Yorkshire came about after he was released by Middlesex in 2019 at the age of 17. The academy was founded in 2021 by Dr. Tom Brown with the goal of addressing the under-representation of British South Asian players in the professional game.
Chohan will not, however, be advancing to the England national team anytime soon. With the rest of the team moving from Barbados to St Lucia, he will instead take a Monday flight home after the team’s easy seven-wicket victory last night gave them a 2-0 lead in the five-match T20I series.
Chohan is scheduled to play for the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash League, which starts on December 15. This in addition to the Lions tour, which runs from November 20 to December 14. This will be Andrew Flintoff’s first appearance as head coach.
The success of the T20I team right now and the abundance of spin options already available to interim head coach Marcus Trescothick and captain Jos Buttler are the reasons behind his dismissal from England’s white-ball selection.
Apart from Chohan’s instructor at Yorkshire, Adil Rashid, with whom he has been working in the nets for the past two weeks, England also has Liam Livingstone, Jacob Bethell, Dan Mousley, and Will Jacks in the starting XI, along with Rehan Ahmed in the wings as a backup legspinner.
“SACA helped me a hell of a lot,” he told ESPNcricinfo in the wake of his call-up. “I felt like my game was in a pretty good place. But there’s no real way in, once I got out of the system. It was really tough to think, ‘Okay, I want to become a pro cricketer, how can I actually do it?. And SACA provided that opportunity for me.”