By Gaurang
January 26 2007

Only six international matches remain for India before they begin their World Cup campaign. Yet there is an unsettled air and even confusion about the make-up of the team. The questions that nearly two years of non-stop experimentation under coach Greg Chappell were supposed to answer, are still largely unanswered. But at least the Indian captain is no longer trotting out the Guru Greg mantra of “process over results”. He unequivocally stated that the first and only purpose of any changes in the team is to win matches. Now if only his rhetoric matched reality that would be wonderful, but still the suspicion remains that experiments are being done while not really worrying about winning each and every game.

The ironic predicament that the Indian management faces is that the players it had written off as being unsuitable for the “future” seem to be the ones whose places are almost certain in the World Cup squad. The experienced duo of Sourav Ganguly and Zaheer Khan had been at the receiving end of much innuendo about their work ethic, their commitment to the cause, etc. So it must indeed be sweet retribution for them that they are now the key batsman and bowler for team India.

The upshot is that the Indian squad for the World Cup is likely to be almost identical to the team Dravid and Chappell inherited when Ganguly was stripped of his captaincy. The only new faces from that time are S. Sreesanth to replace the injured Ashish Nehra, and the late flourishing wicketkeeper who has been converted into a batsman, Dinesh Karthik.

It would be good if the team management acknowledged this fact and started to play this squad of players in the rest of the matches before the trip to the West Indies. It is time the men in blue finally started to gel as a unit, though since most of them were part of the team anyway under Ganguly it may be more like a re-union.

In any case the core that was almost destroyed rather callously and willfully by the current team management with its “mad scientist” approach, where a different eleven was tried in thirty odd successive matches, and players were pushed up and down the batting order like yo-yos, will now once again lead India’s charge in the World Cup. The question is will the present team management survive past the World Cup, regardless of how well or poorly India does in that event? The chances of that look rather slim.