On Dropping Ganguly and Dravid

Since all the Bongs have given up their Bongness and failed to defend their last standing hero against the onslaught of the evil Marathi Manus, it is left to us to do the needful.

On a more serious note, I fail to see the logic behind dropping the two senior players on fitness grounds. First, if Ganguly has been dropped because of his bad running between the wickets and his abysmal ground fielding then he should never have been picked in the first place! It is not as if his fielding has deteriorated over the last couple of seasons; he has been a bad fielder for much of his career.  Dravid on the other hand may not be the fastest man around but he is still India’s best slip fielder by some distance. Considering the importance of slip fielding in Aussie conditions, dropping him can be quite counterproductive.

Second, even if India is building a team for the future, Australia is hardly the best place to start experimenting. You go to Australia to win a series. Period. And that means you utilize your best resources. I find it extremely hard to believe that Rohit Sharma and Robin Uttappa, exciting young talents they might be, are a fit replacement for players of the class of Dravid and Ganguly. And if India was so keen on a young team, the best place to experiment would have been the home series against Pakistan against a decidedly second rate opposition.  What was the Colonel thinking then?

All this talk about building a team for the 2011 World Cup irritates me a great deal. World cups were important twenty years back when the volume of cricket played was less. Now cricket is played all around the year and I certainly fail to see the logic in losing a series in 2008 in the fond hope that we might win the world cup in three years time especially since we haven’t  won it in the last 24 years. It reminds me of K.P.S. Gill, the chief of Indian Hockey Foundation who after dropping players claims that he is building the Indian team for the next Olympics or the world cup as the case might be. Gill uses this excuse for maintaining his stranglehold over Indian Hockey. One wonders as to what is B.C.C.I’s excuse.

Finallly, as the Pondit ji had commented on a chat, it disrupts the unity of team especially after magnificent victory in Perth especially with all the reports of Dhoni being responsible for the axing of Ganguly and Dravid. Both these players would remain part of the test team in the foreseeable future, and this sort of disunity would do the team no good. I am also very amused that apparently the advice for Yuvraj was asked before Ganguly and Dravid were dropped. Considering how well the T-20 champion played in tests (Steve Waugh quite rightly called him an ”unfinished product”) it is interesting to see him pass judgment on two of the finest players India has produced in the last 20 years.