The right captain for India

Following Rahul Dravid's surprise resignation as India's captain last Friday, the BCCI will announce the captain for the one-day side later this evening.

There are many options: Tendulkar, Dhoni and Ganguly being the front-runners. There are several counter-arguments against them becoming captain as well, the primary one being that the captaincy could interfere with their batting and drag down their performance levels.

So here's a left-of-field option. Since the beginning of the 2006/07 season, after the tour of West Indies in 2006, he averages 26 with the bat. Remove his century against Bermuda and the average dips to 21.5. Remove the games in Bangladesh and the meaningless Afro-Asia games and the average dips to 18.3.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest it was right to drop him for the one-dayers in England. Yes, my choice for the one-day captaincy is Virendar Sehwag.

After all, it is highly unlikely that his batting could become worse.

Oh, and by the way, I strongly believe that Dravid was basically pushed to the limit. From whatever I've read about him, he's not the sort of person to throw in the towel because the captaincy was affecting his batting. Maybe he never got the squad/XI/support staff he wanted. Maybe having ex-captains in the dressing room hampered his style. Maybe the absence of a full-time coach meant there were far too many things that he needed to take care of.

Labels: captaincy, dravid, india, sehwag