News fails to change dressing room mood, it’s still very frosty

In the background, the knife hovered over Virender Sehwag, no longer Test vice-captain and now just a few failures away from the freezer. And also, the big question that even some in the team have begun to ask themselves: how will the Chappell-Ganguly mega soap play out now?

Make no mistake, the frost is still very much in place, intense and bitingly cold. And nobody is reaching for the thaw button, at least not from this end, despite serious attempts for a truce between the two over the last 12 months. Then there are backroom players of Indian cricket who have their own sly roles to play in this tragi-comic script. This time, they have hung Ganguly’s selection around this cruel logic: if he fails on the bouncy tracks here, his career is over.

This, they would imagine, is a much better option that giving the ace left-hander a tryout on flat, home pitches against Sri Lanka and the West Indies in the two one-day series that follow early next year before the World Cup. As things stand now, Ganguly is being considered as a short-term option for Tests in place of an injured Yuvraj Singh. But he’s certain to play the first Test at the Wanderers stadium here, with skipper Rahul Dravid’s finger injury unlikely to get the green signal by then.

Anyway, beyond the gameplans, boardroom games and ego wars, Indian cricket fans would simply hope that the former captain would rediscover the lost touch and show the South Africans that this batting line-up actually has a backbone. At the end of the day, at least the fans know, there’s a cricket series to be won.