In an interview, Tendulkar has said that experiments are good from time to time. However, experiments should not be so much that players do not know their roles in the team. These remarks come at the backdrop of numerous experiments by India over the past 18 months. Coming from a player of Tendulkar’s stature, the words carry weight. Before this, a lot of people - former players and media personnel apart from fans have been critical of the amount of experiments by India but they did not come to much as the players themselves had shown no sign of uncertainty.

The situation now is a bit different. A video clipping has also shown Md. Kaif speaking on the same lines. So do players know what is expected of them in the Champions Trophy at least if not the world cup? Do they even have a hint why they are being asked to perform the roles they are being asked? It is important the team think tank (Dravid and Chappell) answer these questions to the players as it is they who are to perform in the end and if they do not know their roles, they cannot obviously go out there in the middle and perform what is expected of them.

Given the world cup is just six months away, it is important the experiments stop to a large extent now as well. If you cannot decipher who has what role to play in 18 months, how can you do it in 22 months? How many of the current lot are certainties for the world cup? As we come closer to the tournament, we should have more and more players certain of their specific roles and more and more players should be close to certainties in the team so that we have a core group of players from whom we can expect a laudable performance.

The bowling attack has developed and moved from strength to strength but we still find a Sreesanth out of a crucial tournament like a Champions Trophy for example. Is he not in the plans of the team? If he is, would a young player like him not have benefited from a big tournament like the champions trophy? The problem is not if the answer to these questions is a yes or a no but the uncertainty which comes up when these questions crop up. What about Anil Kumble? If his poor fielding didn’t stop him from being a key one day player for all these years, why should it be a problem now? He had a poor run in one dayers after which he was dropped but his test match outings clearly show that he has not lost it. So why should Kumble, the best Indian bowler of the past 15 years, not be in the reckoning?

The batting, traditionally India’s strength, is more of the worrying factor. Sehwag has been poor in the past 24 months and has averaged only 28 this year. Harsha Bhogle has mentioned that only two players look good enough to enter the frame for the team right now apart from those in the team already - Laxman and Ganguly. The lack of options we have is the scary part more than whom we select in the end. That we do not know yet who will bat at which position adds to the problem.

It is not late still. The Indian cricket team consists of a bunch of talented individuals and Tendulkar seems to be finally back in form and some level of physical fitness. It is time we step up before it is too late and we look back at what could have been achieved rather than what was.

Update: Here is the cricinfo report on the topic with views of Dravid, Chappell as well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Cricket. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.