When will Dravid learn?

So Dravid's sticking to the five-bowler gamble. A gamble it is because it can only come off if no more than one batsman fails (or somebody gets a big century). By my reckoning, the odds favour another Indian loss. Agarkar for Munaf is hardly a strengthening of the side, going by recent performances - but Dravid obviously feels the need for three pacers to handle the 20 powerplay overs, so let's not belabour the point. On the positive side, I'm glad he's retained the two spinners, which was an obvious thing to do, but you never know with the Indian think tank. Also, Dravid is probably carrying that coin with two heads from Sholay - how else can he win seven tosses in a row?

Are we missing a coach?

It's clear, or should be clear, that India has to go back to the tried and tested combination of six batsmen, keeper and four bowlers for the remaining matches to give itself an even chance of winning the series. With the English weakness against spin exposed, it's clear, or should be obvious, that Munaf's the guy to axe. In his place either Rohit Sharma or Robin Uthappa or both should come in. I wish they would pick Rohit Sharma, whose batting I haven't seen. What's the point of taking a promising youngster on a tour and refusing to pick him even when the team is losing anyway? Whoever is picked, Rohit or Robin, I would like to see him at number four. It would be unrealistic to expect a newcomer to capitalise on the powerplay overs. That's why I think the big three should bat one, two, three. Karthick, if he is retained, should come in after Dhoni because he has shown he can improvise, which is what is required at that stage. Dhoni likes to build his innings before going for the big shots, which means at least one batsman should come after him. Dhoni at three has been suggested, but I think he will do well up the order only on flat sub-continental tracks. I suppose Dravid will again resort to batting first if he wins the toss, after the loss at Edgbaston. A better reason for batting first is the experience of the first day-nighter in Scotland where the ball zipped and darted about at night, contributing to our 180 all out. It was certainly much easier to bat first which is why Collingwood was bemused when Dravid opted to field. Dravid of course was going by his sub-continental experience where the dew gets heavy in the winter and certainly favours the side batting second. He should have checked with the locals how it is in the English summer before making his decision. At Edgbaston too, I think Dravid went by his Irish experience where he put the Proteas in to bat and beat them in two one-dayers with the early morning conditions helping the seamers. Edgbaston was different because the pitch tends to slow down there, which is the reason why big scores have hardly ever been chased down. Again Dravid failed to tap local knowledge. Are we missing a coach, folks?

Can't have your cake and eat it too

Every time Dravid loses a match, he blames it on the batting or bowling or fielding - never the leadership. So it was on Tuesday when he said the big difference between the sides was the fielding. Now, that's not going to change overnight. So are we to take it that India is conceding the rest of the matches? Yes, the fielding was one aspect of the loss in the third ODI at Edgbaston, but that's a given with this Indian one-day side. The point is to look at things that were more in our control, such as the decision to play five bowlers. It clicked in the second ODI at Bristol because all the batsmen thrived and with reason: we were batting first, without much pressure, in the sunny afternoon of a day-nighter on a belter of an outfield with short boundaries - it doesn't get much easier than that. More often than not, however, a couple of the batsmen will flop, as on Tuesday, and that's why the composition of an ODI team has evolved over 30 years into a standard one that most teams follow: six batsmen, a keeper and four bowlers, getting 10 overs out of a couple of batsmen who can turn their arm over, as Collingwood did for England. If there's a great all-rounder in the side, like a Flintoff or a Kapil Dev, that's a bonus. But you can't go into a match with five full-time bowlers, lamenting the lack of an all-rounder. And we do have batsmen in the team who can match Collingwood's bowling - Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar were not used at all. We were on course to chase down England's 281 until Yuvraj ran out of batting partners and had to play with the likes of Powar and Chawla who could not even rotate the strike, and finally Zaheer Khan who did him in by not running. Dravid's dilemma is that he wants to play two spinners but doesn't want to leave out a seamer. It is this lack of decisiveness that cost us the Edgbaston match more than anything else. It would've been a bold decision to go in with two spinners if it had been accompanied by a decision to leave out one of the three seamers. To leave out a batsman is a stupid move that will lose us two matches out of three on average, and win us the odd match like Bristol where the absence of a batsman is not felt. As it turned out, Munaf Patel bowled only five overs at Edgbaston, and Yuvraj bowled seven. So if we have correctly identified the English weakness against spin, we should've played another batsman, giving somebody like young Rohit Sharma a chance in Munaf's place. The trade-off for playing the extra spinner is the problem of managing the power play overs - but surely Ganguly can be trusted to chip in with five overs on an English pitch. In fact, he might have given away fewer than the seven runs an over that Munaf conceded. We might still have lost the match but at least Dravid would've given the team every chance of winning instead of hobbling it from the outset. Will Dravid please put up his hand and own up that it was his decision that cost India the Edgbaston match, more than the fielding?

How to turn an Oval into an egg

How quickly Indian cricket goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. Not since the Pakistan series, when we won the Tests 2-1 and one-days 3-2, have Indian cricket fans had an opportunity to appreciate our team's performance for as long a period as this - the fightback at Lord's, the turn-around at Trent Bridge, and the total dominance for the first three days of the Oval Test. Then a spineless declaration, and some specious arguments in its support, that it was better to play it safe with the series being in the bag even with a draw, that there was no need to expose the team to the risk of a collapse on a fifth day wicket. What was the risk? That in the 170 overs left in the game, England would score at an unlikely four an over for 120 overs, and then dismiss India for 150 in the remaining 50 overs? This was at the Oval where the chances of the pitch becoming unplayable on the fifth day were infinitesimal. In fact, the risk of getting bowled out for 150 was greater in the overcast conditions on the fourth day when India decided to bat instead of enforcing the follow-on, collapsed to 11 for 3, and then trudged through 60 overs with Dravid maintaining a scoring rate of one run per over. That England barely managed to hang on for a draw with Prior and Sidebottom at the crease after losing the six main batsmen on the last day was proof that India would have easily won the Test if it had made England follow on. In fact, we might have got more wickets if Dravid had employed more attacking fields. Kumble bowled without a second slip or short gully and the pacers did not have a third slip most of the time in spite of the unassailable 500-run lead, which allowed catches to slip through unmanned positions. But why go for a 2-0 when 1-0 suffices to win the series? Many good reasons. Indian cricket would have ended the series on a high, instead of coming across as a self-doubting team that considers itself lucky to have squeaked through to a series win thanks to the rain at Lord's. India would have been joint second on the ICC Test rankings, instead of at third position behind England. It negated all the good work of the team over the first three days - the determination of Tendulkar and Lakshman who battled through on the first day after Ganguly and Karthick fell to umpiring blunders, the exploits of Kumble with bat and ball, the smashing 92 by Dhoni, and another sterling show by Zaheer Khan should have been rewarded with a victory instead of having to settle for a draw because of one cowardly decision. What makes it harder to swallow is that the same bunch of senior players let Australia off the hook by not enforcing the follow-on on the fourth day of the Sydney Test, and lost the opportunity to post a historic first-ever Indian series win in Australia. I would have thought the pain of that would have been so deep that such a mistake would never be repeated. In fact, at the end of the third day, I was joking with a colleague that Ganguly's blunder in Sydney would now save the otherwise over-cautious Dravid from committing the mistake. But I underestimated Rahul, the wall, Dravid.

Round one to India

Sunny day, even bounce, batting first... and India off to a bright start of 117 for 1 in 28 overs. Dinesh Karthick is the find of the tour as an opener. He was confident to begin with, and has been growing into the job rapidly. He began cautiously and is now taking the attack to the bowlers. Let's hope he has it in him to get to three figures this time.

How bouncy is the Oval?

I think Wasim Jaffer and Dinesh Karthick are both more suspect against bounce than most openers. And we know the middle order, despite its experience, has looked vulnerable whenever we haven't got a decent start. So the key question for me before the Oval test is how bouncy will be the track?

How cool are the Indians?

I think the Oval test can be lost in the mind before a ball is bowled if the prospect of a series victory gets the Indians keyed up and striving for too much. It's not only the batting and bowling that can suffer from tension, the thinking can get clouded too. The first indicator of that would be if Sree Santh is dropped. Even if he has performed below par so far, and behaved erratically, he got important wickets at crucial times: those of Collingwood and Pietersen come to mind. I also think, going by reports that the Oval track will be drier and bouncier than the others, he might become more effective too. Don't tinker with a winning combo, if it ain't broke - don't fix it, these adages were never more applicable than on the eve of the third test.

Welcome back, Pietersen

Whew! Good to hear Pietersen is back in training after spending a few days nursing a flu. Otherwise with their best batsman missing too, along with the Ashes winning trio of Flintoff, Harmison and Hoggard, a series win against England would hardly be meaningful.

Wink, wink, SLAM, BANG

A beamer is the worst form of offence, because it's dangerous and you can never prove it's deliberate. So it would seem Mike Atherton is justified in calling for a one-match suspension of Sree Santh for bowling one at Kevin Pieterson in the second test at Trent Bridge. What's wrong with the remedy, however, is its ad-hocism. What is the punishment that the English players should get for leaving jelly beans on the pitch, or ostensibly using them to tamper with the ball? How do you deal with Matt Prior's 'deliberate' distraction of Indian batsmen? You can't wink at 'cheating' of that sort, and then cry hoarse over a beamer. What's missing is a clear ICC code that lists all the familiar offences: sledging and abuse, blocking the path of a batsman, picking up a ball on the follow-through and hurling it back towards the batsman when there's no chance of a runout, jostling a batsman while changing ends or shuffling the field, chucking or bowling a beamer, running on the pitch, tampering with the ball in any way... As soon as an offence like this is recorded on camera or caught on microphone or seen by an umpire, it should automatically draw a warning, suspension or ban. If they can do it in football, which is more fast-paced and physical, why not cricket? And if they won't have a strict code, then let there be a free-for-all. Why crib?

Let's not get psyched out

Everyone seems to be expecting the English bowlers to come hard at us at the Oval. That means bouncers. Tremlett and Anderson unleashed a barrage of those on the final day at Trent Bridge, perhaps at the behest of their South African bowling coach Alan Donald, who often used the tactic against the Indians to soften them up. It also paid dividends. Sachin Tendulkar, after getting grilled in the first innings, turned one dug into his ribs into the hands of short leg with only a few runs left to get for victory. Dinesh Karthick pushed at a rising ball to be caught behind, and Wasim Jaffer has been dismissed more than once to the short stuff already in the series. Sourav Ganguly's discomfort against it is well known, even if he is more determined after his comeback to get out of the way or even take a blow but not hole out or fend it off. So, perhaps it's understandable that Sachin and Sourav are spending hours at a bowling machine practising to deal with short pitch bowling. But chief selector Dilip Vengsarkar's comment that the Indians know what to expect seems an over-reaction. Anderson and Tremlett should hardly be the sort to get an experienced batting line-up such as ours into such a tizzy over bouncers. Besides, the bouncer barrage on the final day may have been designed by Donald precisely to throw the Indians off-track. My own feeling is that it is good old English seam and swing bowling that will again do the trick for both teams in the third test, and we should really be practising for that instead of getting all psyched out.

The secret man of the match

The fact that India got to 481 for a match-winning 283-run lead in the first innings of the Trent Bridge Test without a single century shows the application of all the batsmen. Only Dravid failed to get to a 50. The way the batsmen put their heads down to ensure that India derived maximum advantage from dismissing England for 198 after winning the toss on a sticky wicket is to be appreciated without qualification. But now, after savouring the victory, it's worth considering how much the presence of Yuvraj Singh in the balcony concentrated the minds of the Indian batsmen out in the middle. He's a strapping young fellow, in the prime of his batting form, fresh from two match-winning one-day knocks, and an inspiring fielder and close-in catcher to boot. To have such a presence on the bench is surely a great motivator for each of the batsmen whose contributions have come under close scrutiny because of the poor performance of the team over the past three years. So, after 'Zak and the bean struck' (Hindustan Times headline), I think Yuvraj Singh was the man of the match.

Seniors vs juniors? Not really

It's interesting that the seniors have come under so much scrutiny after the near defeat in the Lord's Test. Kapil Dev has pointed out again that Sachin Tendulkar has rarely delivered under pressure. The Times of India compiled a list of his second innings knocks in an 18 year span, with the startling revelation that not once in this long career has the 'world's greatest batsman' ever scored even a fifty in the second innings of any Test India has won. The closest he ever came to taking India home to victory was in Chennai against Pakistan, but after a magnificent 136, with just 15 more runs for India to clinch what would have been one of its greatest victories, he tried to thump Saqlain Mushtaq over his head for a six, fell for the doosra, and holed out with a leading edge to Wasim Akram at mid-off. Why didn't he just collect the remaining runs in singles, instead of playing to the gallery? Captain Azharuddin was asked the question in a post-match conference, and his diplomatic reply was that one couldn't really have asked more of Sachin. Well, more and more people are asking now if we have got too little from the 'Little Master 2.0'. The original Little Master Sunil Gavaskar, we know, scored a century in that great run chase of over 400 to give India a famous win at Port of Spain against Clive Lloyd's team. Of course, an innings like that comes once in a lifetime, and perhaps it is churlish of us to ask why Tendulkar has never had one. But more than how many he got Lord's, what disappointed was the manner of his dismissals. In the first innings he fell to his now familiar bogey of playing across the line to a straightforward inswinger from Anderson. I suspect he keeps getting bowled or LBW these days because he has become a collector of runs on the onside, working the ball with his right arm, because driving would put too much strain on his dodgy left elbow. In the second innings, he again fell LBW, this time to a straightforward armer from Monty Panesar. He was tentative, and didn't stick his bat-pad far enough forward outside off-stump. But the most interesting aspect of this recent criticism of 'seniors' is that it clubs all the four - Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman - together. Now the clamour is that Yuvraj Singh should be in the team, and by inference that means he should take the place of one of the seniors. It can't be Dravid, the captain, who will make way for him in spite of failing to get to double figures in either innings. Surely dropping superhero Sachin is out of the question although he got only 53 in all. So the axe has to fall on either Laxman or Ganguly by default. That I find unpalatable. Laxman has just got back in after a layoff, he did get one run more than Tendulkar, and the ball from Temlett that got him in the second innings did keep low. As for Ganguly, who has become the favourite whipping boy, he got 74 - that's more than any other player in the team except Dhoni who got 76. Karthick and Jaffer did get half centuries, but in the two innings put together they scored 65 and 66 respectively. So really Ganguly should not be the one to sit out if we go by performance. Those who are saying that Yuvi should get in, should therefore spell it out - should Dravid or Tendulkar make way for him, or do they want Laxman and Ganguly's heads as usual? As you can see, it's really a question of seniors versus seniors.

Butterflies bothering batsmen too?

England has a coach, while India has to make do with a septuagenarian manager who makes excuses for the team: the bowlers flopped on the first day because they had butterflies in the stomach. Whatever the reason, the fact is India find themselves staring at defeat against an England side forced to go into the match with a second string bowling attack with Harmison, Hoggard and Flintoff all laid low. That should be shameful for a side that boasts a batting line-up with such legends as Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman. Or should we call them has-beens? Look at the Australians: none of their "seniors" have either opted out or been dropped from the 20-20 World Cup. If you think you are too old for 20-20 cricket, I think you are too old for any form of the game. Gone are the days of lazy Test cricket. Now you need peak fitness to match up at the international level. So I'm bemused that Gavaskar thinks Tendulkar should keep going for another four years so that when the final of the next World Cup is played in Mumbai, he will get a fitting see-off. Another four years of seeing Tendulkar playing across the line and getting bowled or LBW will erase any positive memories I have left of his batting.

The real positives on the Irish tour

While Sachin Tendulkar has drawn all the attention as usual, the other positives for the Indian team on the Irish tour have been glossed over. Dravid's captaincy for one. He not only made the right calls at the toss but also picked the right option after that, something he failed to do against Bangladesh in the World Cup. His handling of the bowling too seemed to be more dynamic than usual, but I may be reading too much into what may simply be a case of 'nothing succeeds like success'. Piyush Chawla also seems to be coming on nicely, although the South Africans, except Kallis, are poor readers of leg spin. And if two match-winning knocks signal a return to form of Yuvraj, that may be the best news of all. He and Dhoni are the only batsmen we have now who can match the Aussies in power.

Give the bowlers their due

It's the bowlers who won the series against South Africa by restricting them to 227 in 50 overs and 148 in 31 overs. Dravid helped their cause by winning the toss and putting the opposition in both times. It was harder to bat first up in these conditions. When it came to the chase, the main thing was not to lose too many wickets to the new ball. Sachin's 93 in the second ODI was therefore important, and it's after a long time that he has contributed significantly to a team victory. That he also crossed the 15,000 run mark during that innings meant all the media attention focussed on him. I suppose it is natural to celebrate an idol's milestones but I think longevity-based records are less important than current achievements. The bowlers, for instance, hardly got any credit for delivering the goods despite their inexperience. That India won the 2nd ODI with six wickets to spare suggests to me Tendulkar's knock was not the decisive factor. The man-of-the-match award should have instead gone to Yuvraj Singh who picked up three wickets as a part-time bowler and then calmly steered India home with 49 not out. He bettered that with a 61 not out in the next ODI which India won easily, despite the early dismissals of Dravid and Tendulkar.

It's a team game, Sachin

For the record, that's one more of Tendulkar's big ODI knocks in vain. How many of those have there been in recent times? One too many, I guess. Okay, the team lost a couple of early wickets - although 36 for 2 in an ODI is not really a crisis - but to go on till the 46th over at a strike rate of 69.23 will lose the game for the team most times. Such a 99 is pointless, from the team's point of view. It's possible the team could have got bowled out cheaply if Tendulkar had fallen earlier in trying to accelerate. But it would have given the team a better chance of victory if he had set his sights higher. After all, the point is to win the game, not reduce the margin of victory. Even the 'Wall' Dravid went at 79.56 and Kallis got his 91 not out at 78.44, and he saw the team home - something Tendulkar does rarely. It was strange to hear the cricket pundits in evening TV shows lamenting our lack of bowling resources, and the fact that Tendulkar did not bowl! In fact, the bowlers did remarkably well to take the match into the last over despite having only 242 to defend. And it was an extra bonus to have the spinners doing well in conditions more suited to seam bowling. The Piyush Chawla googly that did Gibbs in was very nice. No, it wasn't Tendulkar's bowling that was missed as much as his normal attacking self, which he seems to have abandoned in favour of hanging on at the crease these days.

Beg, borrow, steal

Mickey Arthur, the South African coach, has made a few interesting observations about the Indian pace attack of Zaheer Khan, Sreesanth and Agarkar. He feels they all have the skills to pick up early wickets, in the kind of helpful conditions they will find in Ireland and England, but they are inadequate when the ball gets older and in the 'death' overs. He doesn't explain why, but it's probably got to do with their lack of height and inability to get the ball up sharply into the batsman's chest for variety. Anyway, Mickey's asking his top three batsmen to be more circumspect than usual, and have more of a go later in the innings. I think that's a good strategy in general on Irish and English pitches, and since India does not have a coach, Rahul Dravid would do well to pay heed to the South African!

Mutual back-scratching club

I picked up Mukul Kesavan's Men In White, after reading the glowing tribute to it in Outlook by Ramachandra Guha. Then in the book I found Kesavan's glowing references to Ramachandra Guha's book! Anyway, I still read Men In White, and here's my review (which also appears in DNA Sunday)...
Reading Enid Blyton, waking up at 5 a.m. to catch cricket commentary on Radio Australia, and cutting & pasting pictures from Sport & Pastime: Mukul Kesavan's Men In White takes the 40-plus reader on a nostalgic trip to a time when cricket formed a part of growing up in a way that is different from now. Kesavan tends to romanticise this, although the main difference was that there was no TV, which meant the poor fan had to rely on the often biased and ill-informed radio commentators.
The nostalgia is sweet, nevertheless, and older readers will be drawn to it like moths to a flame, at the outset. A chapter or two later, unfortunately, the confession on the book's jacket, that it's an armchair piece by somebody whose topscore was 14 in neighbourhood cricket, turns out to be more than a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating throwaway line. Not that you have to be a Gary Sobers to write about cricket – or a Greg Chappell to coach India, for that matter – but perhaps more of a first-hand feel for cricket, or some other ball game, might have given the writer better insight into the game than is apparent in the book.
Of course, going by his many glowing references to Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner Of A Foreign Field, Kesavan obviously intended his book to be as much social commentary as about cricket. Another reason for this is his vocation, because when he isn’t writing about cricket, Kesavan teaches history at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. Whatever the genesis, the book seems to fall between two stools, neither providing much in the way of fresh insight or interesting anecdotes about Test cricket as a game, nor going deep enough into its sociology or history to use cricket as a backdrop against which to view society.
His fan’s point of view is also ambivalent. The book’s jacket proclaims that “his self-professed credentials for writing about the game are founded on the spectatorial axiom: distance brings perspective”. And yet, in the book, he writes witheringly of the modern Indian spectator: “Not having played in years (or ever) he has no understanding of the contingencies that can turn a match, no first-hand experience of defeat… Seduced by the tidy perfection of televised cricket, failure, in his book, is inexcusable.” Instead of blaming the fan for not being more tolerant of failure, it would have been more worthwhile to look at the mismanagement of India’s most popular sport, which has now reduced us to such a sorry state that nobody wants to coach our team – John Buchanan, Tom Moody, Graham Ford, and even John Emburey having said ‘no, thanks’. Only the highly successful Dav Whatmore said ‘yes’, and our board showed him the middle finger!
Coming back to Kesavan’s Men In White, it covers the whole gamut of topics that come up on the sports pages – the effect of the camera on umpires, Gilchrist going against the Aussie grain by ‘walking’, how skewed the one-day game is in favour of batsmen – with his own takeaways such as this one about how to improve one-day cricket: “Just as there are no artificial restrictions on the number of balls a batsman can face, there should be none on how many a bowler can bowl.” He misses the difference that the batsman ceases to bat if he gets out, whereas the bowler can complete his quota of overs even if he gets smacked for a six.
Some of Kesavan’s asides are more interesting, such as pointing out the hypocrisy that’s become a matter of course in cricket. A batsman is not viewed as a cheat if he stands his ground after getting a nick, but a fielder who claims a catch off a grounded ball is considered plain dishonest, for instance. He also challenges the “Anglo-Australian definition of a ‘sporting’ wicket”, which is often taken for granted. “Why a pitch that turns from the first day is bad is not clear. Why this is worse or more unfair than a pitch where the ball bounces throat high or swings like a banana from start of play is even more obscure,” Kesavan writes. But, like a lot else in the book, the observation is on the dot, without moving the issue forward by really looking into the whys and wherefores.

Non-stop merry-go-round

I'm looking forward to seeing the newcomers in action in England. Not much to look forward to, though, because the only new faces are Rohit Sharma in the ODIs and Ishant Sharma and Ranadeb Bose in the Tests. Rohit, being a middle order bat, is unlikely to get a game unless somebody gets injured. So that's that. Ishant and Ranadeb have more of an opportunity and they might grab it too in the favourable English conditions for swing bowlers. Maybe that's why the selectors thought it would be pointless blooding a young batsman like Rohit Sharma in Test cricket. But then it was at Lord's that Sourav Ganguly established his place in the Indian team with a century, and Rahul Dravid almost got one on debut in the same match. Of course, thay had had a few years of success in domestic cricket before that. Pity we have no new batsman to project on the England tour this time, and this is symptomatic of the mismanagement and decline of Indian cricket. We keep going round and round and the same players keep getting dropped and coming back: Gautam Gambhir, Wasim Jaffer, Ajit Agarkar, VVS Laxman...

What next, Mr Gavaskar?

I sort of anticipated Sunil Gavaskar would trip up Whatmore (What more do we want?), given his antipathy towards Australians ever since his playing days, when Lillee's abuse got under his skin and almost made him abandon a match. But what happens now? Do Gavaskar and Shastri take the responsibility for the fiasco that the coach selection has turned into? No, and that's the problem in our system. There are any number of people influencing decisions, but when it comes to fixing accountability, there's just no clarity. And perhaps that's the way the board likes it.
Look at the coach selection committee. If Chappell turned out to be such a disaster, how come the same experts - Gavaskar, Shastri and Venkataraghavan - are called to select the next coach? What do Gavaskar, Shastri or Venkat have to lose if the wrong choice is made? The board needs full-time, paid counsellors and selectors, not part-timers who have other pre-occupations.
On top of that, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid want to have a say in the appointment. I can understand Dravid being given a hearing because as captain he takes the rap for the team's performance as much as the coach. But Tendulkar is an interested party, because one of the difficult tasks for a new coach will be to watch the performance and fitness of Tendulkar, Ganguly, Laxman and Kumble, and decide if they're contributing enough to winning and team-building.
With so many fading stars, anybody willing to take hard decisions will not be welcome, and yet that's just the sort of coach and selectors that India needs.