Sehwag, Pathan were poor but weren’t dropped till very late and after Pathan was brought back, we might bring back Sehwag as well. The selection committee under More had erred while picking the teams. Indian preparation for the world cup has been left till too late.. We have to resort to try out Uthappa right now and even if he has a few good innings and a few bad ones, we cannot assess his reliability as we would like. Then there is Gambhir of course.

That many players were pretty poor in the last 18 months holds little weight because the team management and selectors were pretty rigid regarding specific players (Ganguly comes to mind instantly as does Kumble) when they should have tried the players who had been too good to ignore in the past or who looked promising enough. Australia rested a few players for the Champions Trophy for instance to get their team right as they approached the world cup.

Now, we have this situation where two players - Pathan is being tried again and Sehwag might be played as well just because we do not know how x y z players are because there isn’t much time to give x y z players a proper run. The Indian selection policies over the past 18 months or so have been a joke. I am blaming the Kiran More lead committee and not the Vengsarkar lead committee here.

The Vengsarkar lead selection committee are fixing the damage as much as possible and have done a good job of it. They brought back players, have tried people (even Jaffer in South Africa was at least an attempt to get things right). Some things have clicked while others haven’t and that is fair enough. What isn’t fair though is that crucial world cup spots like who will open will be decided based on what pans out in the next four games versus Sri Lanka.

It is an emotional roller coaster the youngsters particularly could have done well to do without because such shorter runs harm more than build players. That the moves of the new selection committee seem to be working is a very good sign though and augurs well for India for the world cup. It is a circus Indian cricket would have done well to avoid.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 10:26 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.