Massive cleanup

The BCCI selectors today announced the test and one-day international squads for the tour of England. The three major omissions are Sehwag, Harbhajan and Munaf. On the face of it, it is tough to argue with their exclusions. Munaf's body is probably as fragile as Nasser Hussain's fingers and Shane Bond's bones. Pathan misses out too - he's obviously shot on confidence.

Joe Bloggs/Ramdin/Ramakdin Sehwag has been pathetic in both forms of the game for a year now. After nearly making a century before lunch at St. Lucia, his test match innings scores were 31, 65, 0, 4, 4, 33, 0, 8, 40 and 4. Essentially, a walking wicket 60% of the time.

His one-day numbers are even worse and he should have been dropped a year ago or so. He, along with the likes of Slater and possibly Stuart Clark, will forever make cricket fans scratch their heads: Why on earth have they not adjusted to one-day cricket, given the way they play test cricket?! In the last year, his one-day scores are 9, 8, 1, 10, 9, 17, 65, 0, 18, 11, 19, 12, 46, 2, 114, 48, 30, 21, 45, 52 and 8. The one hundred in that list came against Bermuda.

He scored, on an average, 26 runs every inning. Is that acceptable from a top-order batsman in one-day cricket, when that's the slot everyone's queuing up to bat in? Look at the top run-makers in ODIs - seven out of the top 10 batted in the top four.

It really is high time he was dropped.

Harbhajan's exclusion from the one-day team was expected. In the last year, he's picked up 20 wickets from 13 games, but in 8 out of the 13 games, he picked up just one wicket. Given that he was the sole spinner most of the time, and except for the series in South Africa, the rest of the games were played on wickets which would definitely provide some sort of assistance to spinners, his performance was pathetic as well.

But it is strange that he was dropped from the test team. He played a key role in India's series win in West Indies, picking up 11 wickets in the 2 tests he played, including cleaning up the tail at St. Kitts and bowling beautifully in West Indies' first innings at Jamaica.

Surely if Dhoni is good enough to be a ODI vice-captain (presumably that implies he's being groomed for the captaincy), he can function as a test vice-captain too, ahead of Tendulkar. Exactly what did Laxman do wrong in South Africa?

Labels: england, harbhajan, india, irfan pathan, munaf, sehwag, squad