I just read “Team India without a roadmap” by Sumit Mukerjee of Times News Network.

He writes,

…..”When the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) hired Greg Chappell in mid-2005, it was with a view to prepare a robust Team India which could bring home the 2007 World Cup.

Like a true professional, Chappell took stock of the situation, took a few hard decisions, burnt his fingers, revised his approach and came up with a new road map for Indian cricket that would take them beyond the quadrennial showpiece event. He called it the ‘process’.”….

It is not that India has lost the road map, we did not have one in the first place. What we had was more of a walk up the garden path. Planning for too short a term.

Focus was wholly on preparing a team for success in the shorter version only, and for one specific trophy. Regardless of how prestigious that tournament maybe, it was a process that was bound to destroy the long term future of Indian Cricket.

….” The hustle-bustle of One-day cricket calls for younger legs where every run saved is a run scored”…..

It was thought the problem was laziness of the senior players, which could be easily corrected by discarding them and replacing them with the ‘young legs’ who would win matches by saving runs. Experience was discarded, for the energy of youth.

It was hailed as a hard but necessary decision. What was forgotten was that a team needs to be able to score runs first, just saving runs was never a way to victory.

Or it may have been surmised, with the world’s best batsman in the team ‘building innings and rotating strikes’, runs would not be a problem. There were initial successes, which fueled the feel good factor. We are still ignoring the fact that all those victories came with the supersubs, and they stopped as soon as the trial was scrapped.

One wonders why?

The answer is very simple. In the modern day ODIs, no player should be selected with only a single attribute. The format of the game is such players are needed to multi-task as per the varying conditions and opposition from one match to another. Sehwag, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Yuvraj, Dhoni, Pathan, Harbhajan, Agarkar , were all capable of contributing in more than one role.

Except Dravid, the only player with a certain place in the team. Around whom the other ten players are slotted. But in Dravid we have a player pars excellence in Test cricket. The harsh reality is his style of batting is not suited to the ODI format. Neither is he capable of bowling. This weakness was cleverly concealed during the supersub era. But was cruelly exposed soon after.

The teams performance slumped, and the selectors, coach and captain could do nothing about it. Eventually the old guards had to be called back.

Now, not only we do not have much hope of success in the very World Cup tournament, but too many young players who were prematurely thrown into the arena may have burnt out in an environment their inexperience found too hard to handle. In the process we have lost the strength of our bench for the Test matches as well.

We have only us to blame. We saw it coming, but ignored it as long as we were getting, whatever we wanted.

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