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The selectors' three card trick

Happy New Year, all -- and every best wish for the year ahead.

There's been a lot of debate about the composition of the team for the World Cup -- the question is, 'why?'

What are we debating here -- the 14 the selectors ended up picking? Surely, from the moment they announced the list of probables, it was very clearly evident who they would pick, and who should be picked?

Examine that list: Sourav Ganguly; Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Mohammad Kaif, Yuvraj Singh, Dinesh Mongia, Sanjay Bangar, Zaheer Khan, Javagal Srinath, Ajit Agarkar, Ashish Nehra, Tinu Yohannan, L Balaji, Irfan Pathan (Jr), Avishkar Salvi, J P Yadav, Gautam Gambhir, Rohan Gavaskar, Parthiv Patel, Venkatesh Prasad, Rakesh Patel, Murali Kartik, Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, Sarandeep Singh, Reetinder Singh Sodhi, Sairaj Bahutule, and Deep Dasgupta.

What is the first thought that strikes you when you read that list? For me, those 30 names make up one very clear sentence: 'See, we picked our side already but the ICC says pick 30 first and then pick 14 so hey, here you go, here's our 30 -- the 14 we want, and 16 other names we pulled out of a hat just to make up the numbers.'

Sounds like BCCI bashing, again? Consider this: The list contains five players who have never played for India yet. The selectors had their opportunity to blood these kids during the recent home series against the West Indies, or the ongoing series against the Kiwis, to get a feel for what they could do. In fact, many sections of the media including rediff.com were screaming hoarse for Pathan and Salvi, in particular, to get a go -- imagine if they had managed a decent outing on dead tracks, one or both could have been given their head against the Kiwis on the grassy tracks here, and a good performance here would translate into one, or two, really quick bowlers over their initial nerves, and full of confidence, going into the World Cup.

The opportunity was clearly there, and the selectors clearly were not interested -- obviously, these five, and especially those two, were never going to make the final cut.

You've got two clear-cut discards in Venkatesh Prasad and Deep Dasgupta; and five other players (L Balaji, J P Yadav, Sarandeep Singh, Reetinder Singh Sodhi and Sairaj Bahutule) who have been given the odd game, but who have never figured in the selectors' long range thinking. So how did anyone figure these guys were going to make the WC squad?

Tinu Yohannan got an outing in the Tests, and was packed off home before the ODIs could even begin. Murli Karthik's superb performance at home, on batsmen friendly tracks what is more, against the West Indies after Anil Kumble had failed managed to earn him a ticket to New Zealand for the Test series -- but he didn't get to play, and was being replaced by Kumble before you could even blink. You wouldn't translate that into an act of selectorial faith in either of those hard-done-by lads, would you?

Now think about it -- of the 30, there are 14 players, as above, who were very clearly never going to figure in the thinking of the selectors. So effectively, the selectors picked 14 from 16, not 14 from 30 as is being made out -- so what's the big deal?

To understand what the selectors have done here, you need to look at one of those three-card-trick chappies operating in the bylanes of Mumbai. No matter how many times you imagine you are picking the right card, based on your intuition and observation, that guy manages to make you pick the very card he wants you to pick.

The national selectors could make a fortune if they ever took to the Mumbai bylanes.

There is one selection that is being commented upon; one that deserves to be condemned; and one that deserves applause.

The axing of VVS Laxman, and his replacement with Dinesh Mongia, is the first -- and it is raising some very prominent eyebrows. Not mine -- all that the selectors have done is dropped a senior player short on form, and brought in a junior player equally short on form; and traded the experience of the senior for the youth, as evidenced by his speed in the field and between wickets, of the latter. Again, what's with the fuss?

Compare two bowlers, competing for the same slot, bowling in identical conditions against the same set of batsmen: The first goes for 7-0-48-1 and 6-0-33-0 in the two games he gets. In both, he is the most expensive bowler going, so much so the captain does not even feel confident of giving him his full quota.

The second bowler goes 10-0-46-0 in his first outing -- the only bowler to go under five in a game when his mates were massacred as the opposition piled up 324. He then turns in spells of 10-0-38-1 and 10-0-36-3, before an aberrant spell of 9-0-69-0 in the last game he played (the opposition total here, incidentally, was 315).

Purely on the basis of performance, who would you have picked?

The first was Anil Kumble, the second Murli Karthik, the series in question was the 7-game ODI series against the West Indies and by any yardstick, Murli was outstanding in three out of four games he played in. To then take him to New Zealand, to not play him in a single game, to then drop him from the one day squad and replace him with the very player whose place he took through sheer dint of performance, is unjust.

It is cruel, it is criminal, it is the sheer, cold-blooded murder of an emerging talent. There was for the selectors the opportunity to team an attacking off spinner and an attacking, classical left arm spinner together in a tournament where all the leading contenders are clueless against quality spin. They blew it.

In this context, there is much guff being talked of how South Africa is going to be all about fast bowlers. So? Do we have fast bowlers? No -- or at least, since we never bothered to try out Salvi and Pathan, we don't know.

What is the point of saying everyone is going to be fighting with nuclear weapons so let's take along a few water pistols (with due respect to Srinath and Zaheer, the only two seam bowlers in our team who will do well there), too?

India's most famous one day win -- at least in my book -- is not the 1983 World Cup win, but the one that followed, in 1984, in Australia. In 1983, India were rank outsiders -- 500 to 1 outsiders, in fact, as one lucky bloke found out. In 1984, we were the tall poppies -- the World Cup holders, the one everyone wanted to beat. No contest, really, if you are calculating intrinsic value of those two wins. And it might pay to remember that the second and, at least for me, far more convincing, victory was fashioned on the fast tracks of Australia, by one outstanding leg spinner in Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, whom the world had not seen, backed up by one tight, attacking left arm spinner in Ravi Shastri.

Why didn't India, on that occasion, take six alleged seamers to Australia, since the Champions' Trophy was going to be played at the MCG and Perth and Brisbane and Sydney and such?

That leaves the third selection, the one I believe deserves praise -- and that is the decision to take young Parthiv Patel along, though it is very clear that barring injury to Rahul Dravid, he will not get to play.

The lad is easily the most outstanding talent to have appeared on the horizon in the last few years -- a keeper of world class standards already, at the tender age of 17. He has made the Test berth his own (pause, while I bite my tongue -- with our selectors, you can never be sure). After the World Cup, he is going to figure in the national one day squad as well -- Dravid will not continue doing double duty beyond that point. He will thus become, outside of the three super-seniors Ganguly, Tendulkar and Dravid, be the only player who will walk into both forms of the game.

And that puts him squarely in position to take over the captain's armband in, I'd think, five years time -- by when he would have become a veteran of two World Cups, at the very ripe age of 22.

Every game, every tour he spends with the team now is an investment -- and for making that investment rather than go the predictable route of picking a Deep Dasgupta as Dravid's understudy, the selectors need kudos.

 Personnel is only half the story -- what you do with who you pick is the other half, for another day. Again, every best wish for the year ahead.