India aligned to Virat’s DNA in 2017, Rohit’s show was equally stunning
With 2017 coming to a close, it’s time to look back and count the hits and misses in cricket.
FIVE POSITIVES India team:
Virat Kohli’s team focused on winning at all costs, making fitness non-negotiable. This aggressive new team culture is aligned to Virat’s DNA and constitutes a major departure from the past. The women’s team, led by Mithali Raj with poise, emerged from the shadows of the men’s team with an inspired run in England.
Selection committee: MSK Prasad, the chairman of selectors, deserves credit for building different teams for different formats. MSK takes tough calls in an objective manner. Because of that India has all bases covered with quality sitting on the bench. Such are India’s riches Karun Nair is missing out in Tests, KL Rahul can’t make the one-day squad and Ashwin/ Jadeja are out of the shorter formats.
Star players: The year was huge for Virat and Ashwin; both bossed Test cricket and are on the fast track to achieve legend status. It also saw the stunning rise of Rohit Sharma, a limitedovers expert who is destructive like Sehwag and has the touch of Lara. Harmanpreet Kaur bats like Rohit; her 171 not out in the World Cup was as stunning as Kapil Dev’s unbeaten 175 in 1983.
Domestic cricket: After underperforming for years, Delhi’s resurgence was powered by youngsters Navdeep Saini, Kulwant Khejroliya, Kunal Chandela and Himmat Singh. Vidarbha reached the final for the first time, riding on contributions from imports Wasim Jaffer, G Sateesh and coach Chandrakant Pandit. This season, Ranji threw up exciting new talent -- Prithvi Shaw, Rajneesh Gurbani, Anmolpreet Singh.
IPL: It made smart rule changes covering player retention, player purse and squad strength. It let teams to transfer players mid season, opening up interesting commercial and tactical possibilities.
With little progress on matters of governance, it was a year of lost opportunity for Indian cricket. The CoA was meant to be a nightwatchman, but a year after it took guard it resembles a batsman who can’t put bat to ball. Is BCCI better off under its watch? Has the Lodha committee report been implemented? The answers are obvious.
The BCCI though did extremely well to reorganise its home season and sort out the Future Tours Programme. But to cite IPL’s mega media deal as a governance triumph is playing around with truth. The reality is cricket works in India and corporates put money because of cricket’s amazing connect with fans. Any individual taking credit for attracting money into cricket is deluding himself.
Prominent in the negatives list was the muddled process of selecting the coach, which humiliated Anil Kumble and ended up as a sorry episode. The BCCI treated Ranji Trophy with similar disrespect and its handling of Duleep, scrapped suddenly then restored, was equally appalling.
But the ultimate low point, from a performance perspective, was the India under-19 team’s loss to Nepal.