Its time to introspect

Indians were given a whitewash at the hands of English and am sure heads will start to roll. It is at these times, people tend to take decisions in haste and take all the wrong decisions. There are some repair work need to be done to this Indian team, but do not forget that the repair should be done in the planning as well. The FTP should be planned in such a way that the team gets at least 45 days of break before a major tour starts and have at least 2 or 3 warm up games before the test match starts. Well it is easy to scribble here than to plan but the board must look in to this seriously.  With regards to selection of team, its high time the committee looks in to the fitness level of the players. They should have the guts to drop even the best performing player if he is not fit enough to play. The Zaheer Khan incident ll certainly bring down the morale of the team. Similarly Sehwag was not even half fit for the match and I found no reason on why he was flown to England for the last 2 tests.  The selectors also need to groom in new talents by giving them opportunities at the highest level.  Only in WI tour, I felt the selectors did a very good job but that was due to unavailability of seniors. They should groom the likes of Piyush Chawla, Cheteshwar Puraja, Rohit Sharma and other budding talents. The selectors should have the confidence in these people and give them an extended run in the tests. It is not enough if the players are selected only for the one dayers. After all one day international is anybody’s game where the fortune changes in a matter of minutes. Test cricket is the highest form of game and people should believe in that. Players who have excelled in test cricket have also excelled in other forms of cricket, but its not the other way around. The likes of Dravid, Tendulkar, Kumble they are all the legends of the game who have excelled in all the 3 forms of the game. Raina played some cruicial innings at the world cup, Yuvraj was the player of the tournament but when in England, it was Dravid all the way. He opened the innings, had come 1^st down, kept wickets and still was the leading run scorer for India. Infact he scored more than 50% of the runs scored by India in the whole series. Raina looked completely out of sorts when he was bowled a bouncer. Think of Raina in the early 80’s when WI was packed with fast bowlers. He would have never played cricket in life. One more problem this series has shown is the lack of all rounder. India really felt the absence of a genuine all rounder in the first test. That is where top teams like South Africa, England and Australia really outshine India. India really need to groom Irfan Pathan for the future as he is the only person I know capable of filling the all rounder spot.

It is time to introspect the problems Indian cricket is facing which was not long ago were the world champions and No 1 test team. This series should be an eye opener for the officials and most of the players are nearing their end of career this is the right time to groom younger generations which is certainly going to be good for the future of Indian cricket. Certainly there is no dearth of talent in India, we need to properly guide them and shape them to face the future.