The state of Indian cricket appears healthy to me. You can always enhance the quality by having the right number of teams and planning the calendar in such a way as to accommodate players who play for India. When you have the ideal competition level, it facilitates the best possible structure. It can be achieved by prioritising the quality of the competitions and identifying the players for red-ball and white-ball cricket. We have seen how the Indian Premier League (IPL) has provided the platform to push players for T20 selections.
The competitions at the domestic level are mostly aimed at selections for various formats by identifying and nurturing talent. If you are looking at Test cricket, the focus would obviously be on the Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy, and Irani Cup. These are the pipelines for players rising through the ranks. It also brings to the fore the issue of how much cricket is good for a player.
Please note that the game has changed, and the amount of cricket being played the world over has led to players getting injured more and more as they stay busy through the year. They are constantly under pressure to perform. That brings us to workload management. It is a very difficult segment of building a team.
Any coach and captain would need to rest somebody and yet manage to get the best combination. To achieve that, one has to plan for individuals according to their strengths in the particular format.
It is tough to plan for all the players in a collective process. You can’t have the same 15 and hope for them to be at their best in terms of fitness. A player, when he recovers from an injury, should be tested to see if he is match-ready.
There is an area of importance regarding the focus on spinner friendly pitches in India. There is nothing wrong, but then you also have to strike a balance between bat and ball. There are hardly any spinners competing with R. Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav. You may have the bowlers, but you need the batters to start scoring runs (against the spinners) on such pitches.
Personally, I think batting has become a major challenge (such pitches).To help achieve the right results, it is imperative to address the quality and competitiveness of domestic matches to enable the batters to play some good spinners.
As told to Vijay Lokapally
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