Business Description
The international cricket calendar is packed tighter than a Virar Fast at peak time. So much so that Ravi Shastri, the head coach of the Indian team, reached out to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) asking that the men in power pay a little more attention to scheduling.
This after India had beaten Sri Lanka 3-0 in Tests, 5-0 in One-Day Internationals and 1-0 in the lone Twenty20 International. And Shastri is dead right. Don’t let the results fool you for a second. Even before the team had a chance to savour their historic sweep of their friendly neighbours, they were setting their sights on limited-overs assignments against Australia and New Zealand.
This, while the Duleep Trophy was going on, with some players injured, others ill and a couple not even in the country to take part. In all this, India A are also scheduled to play at some point, although how an eleven will be cobbled together, even in our great country of more than a billion people, in any meaningful manner, is a million-dollar question.
The natural time to take a break, you might argue, is the Indian summer, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) is on, so that the country’s finest can be primed for battle when national duty beckons. But, honestly, expecting Virat Kohli to forego, not just the biggest payday currently on his balance sheet, but also being part of the most high-profile tournament in the calendar, is asking for too much.
And what would Star, the broadcasters, make of India’s finest taking time off from a tournament they just paid nearly `16,500 crores to broadcast over the next five years? With that out of the question, the next best thing to do would be pick and choose players for specific assignments, which is what India’s national selectors seem to be doing.
Ravichandran Ashwin, who has enjoyed perhaps the best year and a half of his playing life in Test cricket, hasn’t had as good a time in limited-overs matches. On paper, he is India’s No. 1 spinner in all formats, but this is hardly reflected in the fact that he didn’t make the playing XI for India’s first two matches in the Champions Trophy. You could argue that this was because conditions in England did not particularly suit his style of bowling, but surely that is not true in either Sri Lanka or at home.
Thanks!
For More Details
Product Video
