It is very surprising to see that a team that rose to the pinnacle of world cricket a year back now stands battered and bruised. India’s performance after the 2011 World Cup has been worth forgetting and does call for some serious introspection.

India in the past one year or so lost their number one test spot to England after a 4-0 series whitewash and if that was not enough, they followed the suit in Australia. Two series whitewashes, ouster from the first round of two ODI series and now a dismal outing at the T20 World Cup, where they could not get past the Super Eights stages.

There seems to be no end to men in blues’ miseries with most of their senior players completely out of touch. Two of their all-time greats Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, retired from the match while reports of alleged rifts between senior players have only worsened the situation.

India ended their last season on a horrendous note but they picked up well in this season. They were on a high before entering the T20 World Cup. Now T20 cricket is something which is highly fancied by Indians and they were seen as a serious contender of the tournament. But what happened next was something none of the Indian fans would have expected.

They crashed out of the tournament and never actually played like champions. And end of it all, skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni came out with a subdued defence saying that it was rain that saw them lose the match to Australia and their performance was satisfactory otherwise.

Well Dhoni should have known that all that mattered was one match. He knew about the weather conditions and should have fielded first in the given circumstances after winning the toss. To it, playing an extra spinner in place of Virender Sehwag in the prevailing conditions proved to be a disaster. Though there aren’t any answers to these questions, but that all the fingers point to Dhoni’s alleged rift with Sehwag.

Though there might not be any truth to these reports, it will definitely push the new selection committee something to ponder over. The newly formed selection committee headed by Sandip Patil’s first task at hand will be selecting team for the home series against England.

It will be very interesting to see how the selectors go about with the state of affairs. It would not be harsh to say that the concept of ‘blue eye boy’ is quite rampant in Indian cricket and often in order to play him, player with better form is ignored. This has had a detrimental effect on Indian cricket and the selectors will have to abolish this, should they have redemption of Indian cricket on their mind.

Also they will have to deal with the problem of apparent rift with a strong fist. If it reports behold any truth, they will have to try and resolve it sooner than later as it does do much harm to players involved, but the team suffers.

Taking decisions on the emotional front is something that should be avoided and the selectors should rather go for someone who is in form. It is always seen that a player failing series after series still find their name in the team. Reason given is lack of option. But then no effort has been made to find options. So the selectors will have to make an all-out effort to try and find enough options to fill in the places whose presence in the team is fast becoming a liability.

Rumours have already been doing the rounds that Patil and Co. are in favour of fielding three different captains for different formats of the game. Well this is a very delicate issue and they will have to give it a good hard thought before taking any decision on this matter. Change of captaincy is a need of the hour but then one cannot be impulsive.

There are chances that it might backfire in case of India. So they will have to contemplate over it a lot and make sure that whatever decision they come up will make the situation better rather than worsening it.

By Samikshan Dutta Chooudhury

Indian Sports News Network

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