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Tour continues quietly, question mark on selectors
NEW DELHI: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was supposed to announce the fate of the rest of the New Zealand tour on Wednesday. The official announcement
NEW DELHI: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was supposed to announce the fate of the rest of the New Zealand tour on Wednesday. The official announcement did not come. Instead, the BCCI said its selection committee will meet on Thursday to pick the squad for the one-dayers against New Zealand and also invited media accreditations for the limited over series, quietly sending out the message that the tour is on.
The newly formed selection committee headed by MSK Prasad will pick its first squad on Thursday and the meeting is slotted in the afternoon. A hearing on BCCI’s defence of the Lodha committee status report is scheduled in the Supreme Court in the morning. A selection committee meeting falls under routine, day to day activity of running cricket in India. But the Lodha committee status report has already pleaded to the bench headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur to quash all futuristic decisions taken at the BCCI AGM on September 21. The selection committee too was picked at the meeting in defiance of the Lodha committee recommendations. It has five members including two who have not played a Test.
It would be interesting to see what the Apex Court has to say about the composition of the selection committee.
If the squad picked on Thursday afternoon stays, the selection committee gets the Supreme Court’s nod. If it is quashed, the tour against New Zealand suffers. BCCI has already played the “game will suffer card” by threatening to call off the New Zealand tour after its bank accounts were briefly frozen on Monday. There might be a rerun.
