Late evening bloodbath: What does sacking of national selectors mean for Indian cricket?

A little after 8.45 pm on Friday, an email from the Board of Control for Cricket in India landed in our inboxes. The subject matter was startling: BCCI invites applications for the position of National Selectors.

It was the first anyone outside the inner circle knew with certainty of the sacking of the senior national selection panel, helmed by Chetan Sharma. That inner circle certainly did not include Chetan and his other three colleagues — Sunil Joshi, Debashish Mohanty and Harvinder Singh – who only came to know of their axing from the incessant calls and messages from the media, seconds after they had finished a meeting to pick the India A team to travel to Bangladesh later this month. Even in change, as they say, some things remain the same in Indian cricket. How hard could it have been for the Indian board to inform these four gentlemen that their services were no longer required?

Even at the time of writing this piece, there has been no official communication whatsoever from the BCCI to the dissolved selection panel, some of whose members are in different parts of the country watching matches in the ongoing all-India 50-over Vijay Hazare Trophy. All this, while lip service is being paid to professionalism!

Also read: BCCI sacks Chetan Sharma-led selection panel

Signs of time to come?

To say that this late evening development has caught most stakeholders by surprise will be an understatement. Yes, some of us might claim to have had an inkling, some others will emphatically assert that they saw this coming, but the shock and disbelief at this swift and dramatic turn of events would suggest otherwise. This is unprecedented in the history of Indian cricket, an entire selection panel being replaced midway through its term. But if it is the first indication that a greater sense of accountability is being demanded of the men who occupy important decision-making positions, then some good might yet come out of it.

Several reasons can be apportioned for this sudden turn of events, which came just a week after India’s elimination in the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup in Australia. Over the last year and a bit, India haven’t had the most storied run in international cricket. They lost the final of the World Test Championship to New Zealand in Southampton in June last year, and worryingly failed to advance beyond the Super 12s of the T20 World Cup in UAE in October-November 2021. Since the start of this year, India have lost three successive overseas Tests, unable to defend targets in each of those games, and failed to make the final of the six-team Asia Cup in the UAE in August-September. All of these put to shade a stirring run in bilateral T20 series between the two World Cups when India went unbeaten in ten straight series. After all, success is measured by outcomes in global competitions and India have been found wanting for nearly a decade now, having failed to clear the semi-final hurdle four times in a row in World Cups of varying formats.

Missing CAC

The performance of the selection panel is meant to be reviewed annually by the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC), but there is no CAC in place right now and this call has been taken beyond that stated ambit. A new CAC will now have to be formulated to pick the next five wise men – the panel was reduced to four after Abey Kuruvilla took over as general manager of the BCCI in March.

In so many ways, many in important positions in Indian cricket will have reason to feel they have been put on notice, that a similar fate might befall them if they don’t deliver the goods. Perhaps, the BCCI mandarins feel there is a complacency within the ranks that needs to be eradicated.

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The timing of the decision is crucial in the sense that there is less than one year to the 50-over World Cup which will be staged in India. The new selectors, who should be in place by the first fortnight of December, will have the unenviable task of pushing the reset button and forming the core group for that tournament as well as the 20-over World Cup in the US and the Caribbean in 2024.

India paid a huge price for taking an ageing team to this year’s World Cup in Australia, where their fitness, or lack of it, was particularly exposed. The period of transition is now, with specific emphasis required on how to blood personnel that execute the mantra of positivity and fearlessness rather than going with players high on reputation but carrying the baggage of the past and bringing along with them mental scars that keep popping up from time to time.

Different captains

One of the tasks the new panel will be entrusted with is to appoint a captain ‘for the team in each format’. It’s the clearest indication yet that a shift from a captain across formats, that has been the norm since Virat Kohli took over as white-ball captain too from Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the start of 2017, is imminent. Rohit Sharma assumed charge as the cross-format skipper in January this year when Kohli stepped down as Test captain, but it is more or less certain that he will have to cede the responsibility at least in T20s, most likely to Hardik Pandya, while retaining the Test and 50-over leadership roles.

Much dust has been raised over head coach Rahul Dravid taking a break and not travelling to New Zealand for a short white-ball series, with his predecessor Ravi Shastri’s voice the loudest. “I don’t believe in breaks,” he said recently, “because I want to understand my teams and players and then be in control of the team. What do you need that many breaks for? You get 2-3 months of break during the IPL, that’s enough to rest. I feel the coach should be hands-on.”

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Few are more qualified than Shastri to hold this stance, considering he didn’t take a day’s break during his six years with the national side. Dravid is under pressure even otherwise, given the lack of results since he took charge 12 months back, though whether the ouster of the selectors is a wake-up call for him too is open to debate.