Sports India

When Indian cricket was in the news for all the wrong reasons during the tour of Zimbabwe last year, the word from the team management was that if Sourav Ganguly and his backers were not rooted out of the system, the Men in Blue would become as bad as the West Indies within six months.

“Indian cricket stands at a crossroads today. If it continues like this, we’ll head the West Indies way. We need to act now to stop that from happening,” was how an important member involved with the side had told Mumbai Mirror in an informal chat during the meaningless series which became famous for Ganguly’s spat with coach Greg Chappell.

Ironically, almost a year later, after the team has been cleansed of its supposed devils and infused with a host of angels, India still find themselves at a crossroads.
The selectors will sit down at the Wankhede today with their scalpels to dissect the 4-1 defeat at the hands of a team that was not thought highly of. And, yes, they’ll also pick the squad for the tri-series in Sri Lanka next month.

Kiran More and Co, indeed, will be at loggerheads over filling quite a few spots, mostly in the bowling department, in the side, which looked set to take on the world over the next year, before they had embarked on the Caribbean snooze cruise.

HOST OF PROBLEMS

The return of Sachin Tendulkar will be welcomed with a sigh of relief but the poor form of Irfan Pathan, the ineffectiveness of Munaf Patel in the shorter version, RP Singh’s sudden slip off the radar, the blow-hot-blow-cold nature of S Sreesanth’s bowling, and the expensive returns of Harbhajan Singh will be a matter of much debate. And therein hangs a strong possibility of the chickens coming back to the roost.

There have been talks of a possible recall of Anil Kumble, Zaheer Khan and Dinesh Mongia to the side. The sooner it happens the better as they seem to be at the top of their game currently.

Zaheer, engaged with Worcestershire, has picked a bucket-full of wickets this English summer. Mongia, the dapper Punjab left-hander has been keeping the scorers busy for the last three seasons at Leicester, and Kumble — as we all know — is still a force to reckon with. His much-improved batting too would bring a sense of comfort to captain Rahul Dravid.

NO MORE EXPERIMENTS

With over 20 one-day internationals before the World Cup gets underway next year, there is simply no time left for the inane experiments that have been the way with Team India in recent times. The policy of backing greenhorns over seasoned campaigners needs to be reviewed urgently. The reverse in West Indies is a timely wake-up call, if we ever needed one.

The scorelines of the five matches in the last series tells us that the young guns, who have been heavily backed, failed to fire. On the contrary, it was the old warhorses who stood up when it mattered. The bowling of Ajit Agarkar and the all-round utility of Virender Sehwag in the West Indies are fine examples of that.

With Tendulkar back, India will get the much-needed resources in the field and the experience at the top. After all, it was the little champion who turned things around during the series in Pakistan, where Dravid’s men won so convincingly.

A little bit of maturity — especially if Kumble gets back in with 264 ODIs under his belt — will do India no harm, and a lot of good, in the bowling department.