Rotation policy augurs well for team reserves

At the start of the Indian cricket team's tour of Zimbabwe, I predicted that Debasish Mohanty would return to India without playing a single Test or one-day international. I was proved wrong when he not only found his way into the eleven against West Indies, but bowled well enough to return excellent figures besides scalping three batsmen. On such occasions, you are glad you were wrong, but Mohanty and Harvinder Singh could well have gone through the tour without playing an international, had the team management not decided to rest Ashish Nehra and Ajit Agarkar.

Nehra has of course made such a huge impression on the tour that he will come back into the eleven for the next match, but Agarkar's place is under threat - I use my words carefully; I would normally have said he had lost it, but the Mumbai all rounder has a way of coming back to haunt us like Vikramaditya's poltergeist. His good deeds in his previous birth (or the first phase of his career when he raced to fifty ODI wickets in record time) seem to rescue him every time his sins of profligacy in this one push him to a corner. A wag recently described him as a crorepati, in a mischievous reference to his seven zeros in a row against Australia, as well as his generous ways with the ball.

The point I'm trying to make is that but for the newfound wisdom in the Indian think tank that favours rotation, these fringe players would have missed almost the entire action on the tour. Mohanty himself is no stranger to the situation, having been the perfect `tourist' not so long ago in Australia. As I said earlier in this column, it can be the most demoralizing experience to be a member of a touring party but denied chances to play. Indian cricket is littered with the sad stories of players who went on tours, hardly played a game, came back to India and were forgotten once and for all. Others like the prolific WV Raman continued to get selected but created world records for the number of times they played drinks waiter.

While other Test and International sides seem to manage this problem rather well, by picking 14 or 15 players good enough to be in the first eleven, India has often been guilty of picking reserves who could be found wanting in an emergency. This sometimes leads to replacements being flown from India, while the reserves continue to twiddle their thumbs.

Thankfully, there are welcome new developments that suggest that there is an increasing tendency towards a consensus approach in Indian cricket. Just as VVS Laxman was retained in Australia at the request of the tour management, Nehra stayed back in Zimbabwe for the triseries under similar circumstances. If such an approach could be adopted regularly at the time the original tour party is selected, there would be fewer chances of some players being sidelined constantly on tour. At the same time, what happened to the overworked Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath can also be avoided.