Other than during the dark days of match fixing, there probably has never been harder times in Indian cricket than what they are currently facing. A side in transition after the retirement of two legends of cricket is never going to be easy, and as the results have shown, it hasn't gone too smoothly for India.
Against top teams, India have sunk to depths never seen before. Even during the 90s when India were poor travellers they were a force to consider at home. In the previous decade, they did well to remove the tag of tigers at home and lambs overseas, but recent results have erased out all the hardwork done.
When the team is not doing well, there will always be loud talk about who must be dropped and who must be
With the amount of T20 games being played these days thanks to the countless number of domestic leagues which have formed across the globe, one tends to wonder is the ICC T20 World Cup really required. And if it is, what purpose does it serve. One of the things I feel the ICC is trying to achieve with a T20 world cup is to globalize the game. Cricket on a whole is played seriously by very few nations and to spread the game, T20 seems to be the most viable option. Also being such a short tournament, number of mismatches between the top teams and the minnows won’t be much of an issue as it is in the case of the 50 overs World Cup.
But one wonders, what happens to the associate teams after the world cup is over. Fair enough,
Ever since the retirement of Sourav Ganguly from test matches in late 2008, India have been looking for a reliable replacement for him. Four years have passed but India still haven’t got a player who has sealed the spot. Now with the retirements of Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, the numbers of vacant spots have increased. There are a lot of contenders for the 3 spots mainly Virat Kohli, Pujara, Rohit Sharma, Badrinath, Tiwary and Suresh Raina. Raina’s case is the most interesting. He has been around in the one day squad for around 5 years now and has become a very valuable player in the ODI team. It was natural that the selectors gave him an opportunity in Test matches after Yuvraj Singh couldn’t come up with consistent
The big thing circling around in the cricket world these days is whether the DRS i.e. the Decision Review System (or Dravid Removal System as some of the Indian fans call it) should be made compulsory for all cricket matches or not. First things first, whatever the ICC decides, it must be uniform and must be applied to all the matches. It’s just ridiculous that you have one series played with DRS and another without DRS. Mind you even the series which play with the DRS, rules implemented are applied in different forms. Some have Hawkeye as one of the judging criteria some have only Hotspot! It’s really bizarre and silly that you have a game which is being played with different rules in different continents.
