Selection trial

Faisal Shariff

As I peeped through the fine, transparent groove on the glass door of the conference room of the Wankhede stadium, Bombay, the venue of Friday's selection committee meeting, a thousand questions ran through my mind.

I saw Sourav Ganguly, who had less than 24 hours ago been retained as leader of the pack, meekly sit at the selection table, quietly whispering his thoughts into the ear of coach John Wright, who, in turn, would bounce off his thoughts across the table to the selectors. Not once did the skipper speak aloud, a characteristic that has brought him bags of flak from all quarters.

It is a pity that the media lapped up a so-called move to sack Ganguly as skipper, and instead of backing up India’s only captain after Tiger Pataudi and Bishen Bedi with three away Test wins under his belt, tried to pull him down.

According to teammates, Ganguly, who was always unfazed by what was being written about him, was suddenly reacting to comments made about him and his loss of form. Better sense prevailed and Sourav was retained captain for the South African tour.

As the five wise men along with the oracle of Indian cricket, BCCI secretary Jaywant Lele, trimmed down the Indian contingent for the tour next month, one wondered what it would be like if the paying public could actually witness a selection committee meeting.

Would it put an end to the zonal politics, which since time immemorial has been the bane of Indian cricket? Would it change anything? Would the selection be fairer if witnessed under the watchful eyes of a nation that has an expert opinion on the sport unlike on any other issue?

Would it reveal to the public that Jaywant Lele in effect doesn’t just sit there just as a representative of the board but has an equal, if not more, vociferous influence on the selection procedure?

An incident that comes to mind to back this fact is one during the selection meeting for the Test squad to Sri Lanka last month. Lele was advocating the inclusion of Jacob Martin ahead of Mohammed Kaif in the Test squad. In his enthusiasm to prove his point, he even called up a statistician during the meeting and compared the season's performances of the two batsmen.

After hours of reconciliation and debate, chairman of selectors Chandu Borde and Lele announced the team to South Africa and furnished half-baked answers for indigestion.

So while one of the main reasons for Shiv Sundar Das’s inclusion in the one-day squad is to help him acclimatize to the wickets in the Southern Cape, the same logic didn’t apply to the other opening batsman S Ramesh. He is a certainty on the Test team to South Africa, but why hasn't he been asked to go to South Africa a week or two before the Tests get underway?

If the reason given for his failure to convert his forties and fifties to hundreds, according to coach Wright, is the fact that he fails to select his shots well, then it only defies logic not to have him on board. One must not forget that this Madras-based batsman has six fifties in the 24 ODIs he has played in against England, Pakistan, Australia, West Indies, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

And though he has a mediocre average of 28 in ODIs, his record is still better than born-again VVS Laxman's (26) in approximately the same number of ODIs, besides the fact that the lanky Hyderabadi is yet to get a fifty outside the sub-continent.

And though for the first time in many seasons the selectors have picked 15 players who can all actually play -- in other words, a team sans tourists --- there are some disgruntled quarters.

Though the team management seems a bit miffed about the exclusion of Punjab medium-pacer Harvinder Singh at the expense of veteran Venkatesh Prasad, the exclusion of Hemang Badani from the ODI squad is harder to grasp. Following his failures in the Test series in Sri Lanka, the southpaw should have been retained in the ODI squad to regain form and lost-confidence, believes the team management.

The selection of rookie 'keeper Deep Dasgupta from Bengal is a gamble nonetheless, since neither of the senior players, with the exception of Ganguly, who has just played one game with Deep, have seen Deep play.

Perhaps, National Cricket Academy coach Balwinder Singh Sandhu’s opinion -- that though Ajay Ratra has better glove-work, Deep is a better bat -- tilted the scales in favour of Dasgupta.

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