The immediate focus is the T20 World Cup provisional squad selection. The small matter of picking the squads for the white-ball series — three ODIs and five T20Is — against New Zealand next month is there as well. The World Cup starts on February 7 and the participating cricket boards will have to send the provisional squads to the ICC by early January.
The Ajit Agarkar-led selection committee will pick the Indian squad for the World Cup on Saturday. The BCCI hasn’t confirmed it yet. On the face of it, Test cricket has taken a back seat at the moment. India’s next red-ball assignment is a two-Test series in Sri Lanka in August next year and it’s not a matter of priority, with a World Cup round the corner.
Wrong. The BCCI has taken note of the team’s decline in the longest format and efforts are on to get the house in order. According to a source, going ahead, the selectors and the team management could be asked to stop continuous experiments and focus on stability.
“The Test team has lost stalwarts en masse,” said the source. “Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ravichandran Ashwin. Ajinkya Rahane, too, is no longer in the scheme of things. It was always going to be difficult to make a seamless transition. At the same time, maybe, a few things need to be looked into, like too much experiments.”
After suffering a home whitewash against the Proteas — the second in 12-odd months after being clean swept 3-0 by New Zealand last year — the BCCI brass had an informal discussion with head coach Gautam Gambhir and chief selector Agarkar. But the cricket board deliberately didn’t do a formal review meeting. “A formal review meeting in the middle of a series could have demoralised the team,” a BCCI official told this correspondent a couple of weeks ago. He talked logic.
There’s a school of thought that too many experiments have been making the players insecure and creating instability. Take the case of Washington Sundar, who has batted at No. 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 in Tests over the last few months. The series against South Africa was a case in point. Washington was the one-drop in the first Test at Eden Gardens as Sai Sudharsan was dropped. In the next game in Guwahati, as Sai was brought back to playing XI, Washington was pushed down the order despite showing resolve at No. 3 on a treacherous Eden pitch.
Yes, the primary focus is the T20 World Cup at the moment, and rightly so. But the BCCI is not putting the Test plans completely on the back burner.
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