The tour of SA ended less than a week ago and already India are looking ahead to the four-match ODI series against the West Indies.
Chappell’s report deride senior batsmen’s negative attitude
RAJKOT: The tour of South Africa ended less than a week ago and already India are looking ahead to the four-match ODI series against the West Indies. But it would be difficult to go forward without first evaluating the gains and losses from South Africa.
Sehwag’s lacklustre performance has seen him dropped from the squad for the first two ODIs while Sourav Ganguly has been included (selection report, p27).
An interesting sidelight to the selection committee meeting in Rajkot was India coach Greg Chappell’s perspective of the South Africa tour. It is reliably learnt that he wasn’t too pleased with the efforts of the senior batsmen.
While Chappell did not single out any one batsman for criticism, he felt the team was let down by the inability of the Indian batsmen as a whole to perform when the team needed them.
“The batsmen had to be positive, but we could see that they just weren’t. The manner in which Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar batted at Cape Town left no one in doubt as to what their intentions were — they were trying to save the match, not win it,” is the gist of what Chappell told the selectors, a source close to the committee revealed.
“But it was all the senior batsmen who were guilty of disappointing. The Tendulkar of five years ago would have crushed the likes of left-arm spinner Paul Harris (who tied Tendulkar down by bowling a line outside the leg-stump in the third Test).
“Chappell was pleased by the efforts of Sourav Ganguly and Zaheer Khan, who were both making comebacks. The trouble that Ganguly and Chappell have had in the past wasn’t even discussed. Chappell felt that Ganguly was very focussed on the job at hand,” the source added.
Sehwag’s deteriorating fitness levels haven’t pleased Chappell too much. Sreesanth, as expected, got a lot of praise. But Chappell has been a long-time supporter and had even campaigned to have the Kerala fast bowler tour Pakistan in January-February last year. But the selection committee, with the exception of one selector, voted to send an unfit Zaheer Khan instead.
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