Opinion By not picking best T20 team,India belittled contest: Harsha Bhogle
Getting the best T20 India team would have meant flying out no more than two or three players.
If I was a young man who had done well in the IPL,say Manish Pandey or Ambati Rayudu or Manoj Tiwary or indeed even S Badrinath,or if I was Yusuf Pathan,I would have been heartbroken to see the team India put out for the T20 international against England. Neither of the first three in the order would have made the first choice eleven and even if two of them eventually did well,it doesnt justify their being asked to play.
As it turns out it was great fun to watch Ajinkya Rahane and Rahul Dravid put together the partnership of the day for India,and I was delighted young Rahane was finally noticed,but they were on the ground for the wrong reasons. I would like to believe that everytime an Indian team takes the field,it has to be the best possible. At Old Trafford,India looked at whoever was left standing from a fifty overs team and took the field. In doing so,they belittled the contest.
Getting the best T20 team to represent India would have meant flying out no more than two or three players beyond those that were in the fifty overs team. It is not a staggering cost and it certainly pales before the pride those two or three would have experienced. We send people to South Africa and to England for an appointment with a doctor,so surely we should be able to put them on a plane for the privilege of playing for India. Yusuf Pathan should have been there and at least two other top order batsmen based on performances back home.
Selection is the most powerful arm of the BCCI,for it can encourage and admonish players,nurture them or ask them to grow further. In fact the selectors are the unseen heroes behind Englands resurgence. At all times the aim must be to put the best Indian team on the park. India did not do that at Old Trafford.
Rahane benefitted from this lack of passion in selection and I am delighted for him because he is a seriously good cricketer; someone we should see a lot more of in the future. Hes someone who has done it the hard way; not just a flashy innings here or there but 4673 first-class runs at 67.72 and seventeen centuries. And as Rahul Dravid debuted at the other end,a farce in itself,Rahane should have experienced the privilege of batting with nobility.
It could be argued that part of the reason India had to go through this charade was that Gautam Gambhir was suddenly declared unfit. It was the worlds most open secret that he wasnt going to play and its just a pity that it took ten days to take that decision; time that could have been well spent in getting another cricketer to acclimatise. That cricketer,Ravindra Jadeja,will now turn up cold since he wasnt with the Emerging Players Squad in Australia.
The choice of Jadeja itself is intriguing since it isnt a like-for-like replacement which is what you would have expected. To my mind it is an admission that the team originally picked for the one-day internationals was imbalanced with no one suited to playing at number seven. You didnt need that at the World Cup because the all-rounder was Yuvraj Singh but here India needed that bridge player. And so,strangely,an opener gets replaced by a bowling all-rounder. Its been a bit bizarre on the selection front in recent times.
And so as India lurch their way along off the field,they need to win something on it. Five internationals have come and gone and if India dont win one of the first two one-day games,they can very quickly start waiting for the tour to end; which in itself is a recipe for defeat. It would be interesting to see if India take the bolder option of playing six batsmen and five bowlers for otherwise the bowling would be too fragile to win a tough contest. It might empower the batting,that was the reason Dravid was recalled,and that is rarely a bad thing to do. And now that Dravid must play,India should be bold enough to go in with Tendulkar,Dravid,Kohli,Sharma,Dhoni and Raina with Rahane as a back up to the top six.
Meanwhile,word is that a new selection committee will be formed. I hope taking tough calls is one of the traits that is being searched for.
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