Indian news round-up

Three trainees at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore, Sridharan Sriram of Tamil Nadu, Md Kaif of Uttar Pradesh and Shyam Sundar Das of Orissa left for Australia from Chennai on Monday night as part of the Gavaskar-Border scheme which aims at providing promising players a chance to further hone their skills.

The three players will spend six weeks at the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide. There is an understanding between the ACA and the NCA and it is quite likely that trainees at the ACA could also visit the NCA in the near future. The NCA incidentally was inaugurated by former Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh who is also the director of the ACA.

The three youngsters were selected by Gavaskar and Marsh who had watched them at the nets at Bangalore. Sriram, who is a left hand batsman and a left arm spinner, has played for India in a ODI while Kaif, a right hand middle order batsman, has represented India in one Test against South Africa last season. Das, an upcoming opening batsman, is yet to play for the country.

There has been considerable criticism against the policy of playing too many one day internationals and probably taking note of this, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, as a first step towards restricting the number of such matches that the Indian team can play, has pulled out of the tri series scheduled to be held in Singapore from August 20.

The Singapore Cricket Association announced its schedule a few days ago, but the BCCI ended speculation about the Indians' participation by informing the organisers that the team would not be taking part.

The SCA secretary Anil Kalaver made a dash to Dhaka to persuade the BCCI officials who refused to budge from their stand. The match fixing scandal could also be a further reason why the BCCI decided against participation. Howver, there is no question of India backing out of the Sahara Cup in September since that series involves contractual obligation with the IMG-TWI.