Four months after Chetan Sharma was forced to resign as Indian cricket’s Chief selector, entries will be called to fill his replacement. “A full-strength selection committee will be in place before the ODI World Cup,” a BCCI official said.
Sharma was a surprise selector at the North Zone Duleep trophy selection meet on Thursday. But there are no plans to reinstate him at the national level.
Meanwhile, selection meetings have been chaired by interim head Shiv Sundar Das. India’s ODI team in the home series against Australia, the Test team for the Border-Gavaskar trophy, and the squad for the WTC final were all picked by a four-man panel.
Five selectors or four or, for that matter, three is only a constitutional anomaly. As far back as 1998, a BCCI review committee had suggested that the five-men selection committee be pruned to three. It was also one of the Lodha committee recommendations, which wasn’t accepted.
BCCI’s contention was that five selectors were necessary to scout talent across the Indian cricket landscape. As it’s turned out, for one reason or the other (Abey Kuruvilla and Chetan Sharma moved on), selections have mostly been performed by four-member committees for the past sixteen months.
FOUR YEARS, FOUR CHIEF SELECTORS
More than the strength of the committee, the constant chop and change in the Chair has crippled the selection panel’s outlook. When the new Chief selector takes over, he will be the fifth name at the top in the past three-and-half years. Sunil Joshi, who replaced MSK Prasad in March 2020 held the post for mere nine months. Chetan Sharma’s twin stints lasted a little over two years. Das knows he’s only doing a temporary job.
{{/usCountry}}More than the strength of the committee, the constant chop and change in the Chair has crippled the selection panel’s outlook. When the new Chief selector takes over, he will be the fifth name at the top in the past three-and-half years. Sunil Joshi, who replaced MSK Prasad in March 2020 held the post for mere nine months. Chetan Sharma’s twin stints lasted a little over two years. Das knows he’s only doing a temporary job.
{{/usCountry}}If Indian cricket has been consistently making ICC knockout rounds, despite this churn, it’s because two powerful team managements – Virat Kohli-Ravi Shastri and Rohit Sharma-Rahul Dravid – have driven policy decisions, backstage. But even they could benefit by having a sounding board, a part that a settled long-term chief selector would be expected to play.
When England tried to double the head coach’s workload with selection during Chris Silverwood’s stint, it badly backfired. That’s because a chief selector is also there to challenge the team management with a counter-view when required. The captain is generally the first man on the team sheet, but it is the selector’s job to nudge the captain from time to time to raise his game when it’s slackening. It is also the chief selector who has to navigate a team through the transition.
None of these requirements will be listed in the advert for the new selector but his to-do list will be comprehensive and challenging. It’s unlikely that Rohit Sharma, 36, will continue leading the team across formats after the October-November World Cup. Hardik Pandya is expected to lead in the next T20 World Cup, but there’s nothing official about it yet. The World Cup will give a peek at what the future holds in the ODI format. The Test team consists of an ageing middle-order, that’s not short of class and can perhaps still hold the fort. But it’s the selector’s job to spot the cracks early before they widen.
The fast-bowling group’s mounting workload remains a constant challenge. Major injuries to match-winners like Rishabh Pant and Jasprit Bumrah have posed perplexing questions before the selectors.
Even Dravid’s coaching contract runs until the ODI World Cup. With the quest for a fresh ICC title always on the horizon in the new calendar, Indian cricket could do with a chief selector that can do justice to the gravitas the post commands.
STRUCTURES GONE MISSING
The days when the all-powerful chief selector would call the shots are perhaps long gone. Many of the defining moves in world cricket in recent times have been piloted by top team management.
When Eoin Morgan was leading England’s white-ball revolution in the mid-2010’s, Brendon McCullum was doing the same with New Zealand cricket. The Kiwi has now tag-teamed with Ben Stokes to reinvent England’s Test cricket. Central to each of these success stories has been a reformist attitude, complimented by a structured top-down approach. There have been efforts to take the uber-aggressive playing method to county cricket.
Indian cricket needs to look no further than Kohli-Shastri’s successful years, when their ambition to play fierce Test cricket was ably assisted by Dravid’s shadow-tours program, with MSK Prasad playing the conduit as the selection chairman. Those structures have gone missing in recent times. It’s perhaps why a domestic run-machine like Sarfaraz Khan has no finishing school to prove whether he can deliver on the highest stage. IPL rhythm is all the selectors sometimes have to lean on, before handing out Test comebacks. Yes, cross-format selection calls have become more common. A Suryakumar Yadav would never get a crack at Test cricket, if that wasn’t the case. But there’s always a method to the madness. Indian cricket needs to rediscover its way. A perceptive selection head may be a good way to start.