By Gaurang
February 13 2007

The Indian selectors have announced their squad of 15 players for the upcoming World Cup. All the "experiments" by coach Chappell over the last couple of years have come to naught. The players picked are:

Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Robin Uthappa, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Dinesh Karthik, Irfan Pathan, Ajit Agarkar, Harbhajan Singh, Anil Kumble, Zaheer Khan, S. Sreesanth, Munaf Patel.

The squad has no fewer than nine players who were in South Africa for the 2003 World Cup and is even more similar to one that India had about 18 months ago when Greg Chappell took over as the Indian coach, and Rahul Dravid was given the Indian captaincy.

The only real changes are Munaf Patel for Ashish Nehra, S. Sreesanth for R.P. Singh, Robin Uthappa for VVS Laxman and Dinesh Karthik for Mohammad Kaif. The rest of the squad and especially the Core of the team is virtually identical to the squad that Sourav Ganguly last led in 2005.

As this writer had written nearly a year ago, the biggest problem with Greg Chappell and Kiran More’s “Mad-Scientist” approach to team selection, where you test a new player for a few games then discard him if he is not performing, is that it would shatter the settled Core of the team, a Core that Ganguly and John Wright, the previous coach, had so painstakingly built over a period of four or five years.

It would also create an atmosphere of confusion, insecurity and even fear among the players, who would now not be complacent, as they knew they could be cut from the team at the drop of a hat, but who would also now not be fiercely loyal to the Team, Captain and Coach and would not give 110% when the situation demanded it.

After a series of reversals and increasingly poor performances, including coming in third in a three team tournament in Malaysia, crashing out in the league phase itself of the mini-World Cup played in India, and finally being white-washed by South Africa in a head-to-head series, the newly appointed Chief of Selectors, Dilip Vengsarkar, who succeeded More, in the middle of this dismal run of 15 losses in 18 games, finally decided “Enough is Enough.”

Vengsarkar, put his foot down and scotched the headstrong Coach and his pliant Captain’s mantra of “process over results” and insisted that the only purpose of playing international matches was to try and win. Experiments for the sake of team building, discovering the hidden talents of youngsters, or hoped for future success in the World Cup was not a strategy that he would tolerate. He brought back the commonsense notion that experiments are only to be a minor part of team selection, with the primary focus being on winning.

Since then the team has once again reconstituted its shattered Core. Discarded veterans, Zaheer Khan, Anil Kumble, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly were all recalled to the Test and One-day team. The Indian team’s performance in both the Test and One-day matches since then has been on an up-tick. In announcing the squad of fifteen players for the World Cup, once again this commonsense approach has been followed. The Core has been preserved.

Yes, there are questions about the match fitness and form of some of the Core members including the key trio of Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh and Irfan Pathan. But at least now the speculation is over and there is still time for the squad which has been announced to gel and settle into a groove.

There are still two One-day internationals to be played against Sri Lanka, and there is the domestic Ranji One-day tournament to be followed by the premiere domestic One-day tournament, the Deodhar Trophy, before Team India leaves for West Indies. Some of the players whose match fitness and form is questionable could be asked to play these matches, in order to get into prime condition for the big event. The emphasis that Vengsarkar and the BCCI have given to domestic cricket, would also indicate that is likely going to be demanded of certain players.

In the end all the hullabaloo about “Experimentation” from Greg Chappell has come basically to naught. The Core team has been reconstituted, with a sprinkling of fresh faces, which is exactly as it should be. The question though for team India is: Has the last eighteen months of crazy chopping and changing, done too much damage and created too many rifts and cracks in the team, for it to come together? One hopes that is not the case, and that the senior players led by Captain Rahul Dravid and his circle of fellow seniors, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly can provide the healing balm of collective experience to overcome the wounds of irrational experimentation that Team India had to endure in the past eighteen months or so.