And yet another totally insignificant triangular tournament gets underway and people wonder why attendance for one day internationals is dwindling.
However what is worth commenting on, from the perspective of an Indian fan, has been the return of Rahul Dravid into the one-day side. A year ago, another player of his generation Sourav Ganguly was forced into retirement at a time when he was arguably playing the best Test cricket of his life (his best one day form was behind him but he was still worth his place in the side in my opinion) by the present board. Then we were told by the pundits, both at the “Home for Cricket” and on this comment-space and other fora, that the basis of the argument for Ganguly’s continuance ,which relied on recent performances and averages and things like form, was fundamentally flawed.
Simply because this was the new age (Vision 2007 or Disco 82 or Hope 86 I forget what it was called) where the paradigm of cricket had changed so much that just batting alone was no longer going to cut it, where Ganguly’s undoubted poor fitness and sluggishness on the field were the overriding considerations in his being rendered useless to Team India. In support of this thesis not only was Ganguly removed from the ODI side (and soon also from the Test side) but also Dravid after he had scored 80 runs in nine innings.
Continue reading ‘The Principle Of It’
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