Qualification norms for selectors to be discussed

With doubts lingering on whether Jagmohan Dalmiya, the new Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) president, would attend the BCCI's working committee meeting tomorrow, the focus now shifts to discussions on fresh qualification norms to pick the new selection panel.

It's learnt that Dalmiya, who staged a comeback to cricket administration with a West Bengal election win last month after being ousted from the BCCI in 2006, will send one of his joint secretaries instead. In the event, the new selection norms are expected to be the key subject of debate tomorrow, apart from a review of the Indian board's accounts for the last calendar year, its budget for the next year, and the agenda and dates for its annual general meeting (AGM) next month.

After the 2007 AGM, the board had decided to constitute a paid selection panel from September 2008. Some of the members' term in the present selection panel, chaired by Dilip Vengsarkar, comes to end on September 30. Even then the working committee had debated on putting into place a centralised selection system where a selector needed to fulfill certain criteria.

The proposal was that the senior selectors should have played at least five Tests or 50 first-class matches and the junior selectors a minimum of 25 first-class games and should not be members of any association's managing committee. That proposal never got passed as the board decided to do away with the eligibility criteria and allowed the selectors to be part of the managing committees of their respective associations. It said that the working committee could lay down the criteria whenever it needed to without making it part of the constitution.

In the past there was also a proposal to appoint a centralised selection panel comprising three selectors based on certain qualifications instead of picking one from each zone, but there was no consensus then and it seems highly unlikely that proposal will see the light of the day even now. But some of the members on the committee feel it is time to once again have a debate on the issue. "Without changing the original system of allowing one selector to be nominated from each of the five zones in the country the board wants to revamp the process by which a selector is picked", a BCCI official pointed out.