Indian selectors get drunk together, make some call-ups, regret it in the morning

So the squad for the first test against South Africa has been picked, and it goes like this:

MS Dhoni (capt/wk), Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, S Badrinath, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Amit Mishra, Pragyan Ojha, Ishant Sharma, M Vijay, Sudeep Tyagi, Abhimanyu Mithun, Wriddhiman Saha.

No Dravid, no Yuvraj, no Sreesanth - due to injury.

If the newbies were picked on the basis of form, I don't know what Badrinath is doing in the squad. Yes, his record is great, but Mohammed Kaif has scored a double century and a century in one week in domestic cricket and has experience at the Test level, Abhishek Nayar has been amazingly consistent and I've no idea why Cheteshwar Pujara continues to be overlooked.

This is probably not even an important selection but Saha? Really? What has Karthik done wrong?

The fast bowling cupboard suddenly looks bare again... Zaheer and Ishant are far ahead of everyone and seem to have cemented their places, but a while ago there was Irfan Pathan, RP Singh and Munaf Patel to fill in for an injured player. Now there's Tyagi, who seems a good prospect, and Mithun, who is a pretty good quick but it's only his debut season in first class cricket. Hasn't even played the IPL yet (yep, that's what we measure experience by these days).

Plenty of batting in the wings - Rohit Sharma can't suddenly be trusted to bat responsibly because of one triple century and Rahane, Mukund, Pandey and Dhawan have their days ahead of them.

The line-up for the first test is likely to be:

Sehwag, Gambhir, Vijay, Tendulkar, Laxman, Badrinath, Dhoni, Harbhajan, Zaheer, Ishant, Ojha.

Which doesn't look all bad. Except for the gaping Dravid-sized hole. Well, he doesn't have many years ahead of him - might as well face it early, right?

Right?

1 comments:

Hi Rish, thank you for the nice comment, it'll be interesting to follow your posts in the upcoming series, as I support SA ;)
Nice blog mate
Cheers
Wes

~ Play For Country Not For Self ~

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