The great Indian selection circus

One of the more dramatic events of the first week of the Ranji season was Hyderabad being shot out for 21 by Rajasthan. It made a lot of news, but what followed was also quite unprecedented, though not quite as well noticed.

The executive committee of the Hyderabad Cricket Association (HCA) took the unprecedented step of questioning the selection of the Ranji team. Usually, once the selectors are appointed for the season, the association doesn't interfere. But in this instance, obviously stung by the humiliating defeat at the hands of Rajasthan, the executive committee was forced to act.

Unlike some other associations, HCA's executive committee didn't turn a blind eye to the events around them. What usually happens is that whenever there is a cat of this sort to be belled, the members of the cricket improvement committees in state associations point fingers towards the executive committee. It is their way of saying that the executive committee has the real power and that they are the only ones that can stop the nepotism that rears its head from time to time in Indian cricket at all levels.

There is one way nepotism can be stopped - if not at every level, at least when it comes to junior selection or in picking players for the zonal competitions or the level just below the national squad - the A team or Emerging Player levels.

It has been tried before from 2002 to 2006, and we saw some good results with the Talent Resource Development Wing (TRDW) that I launched on behalf of the BCCI. It led to the emergence of many players who came from outside the old centres and didn't have any godfathers.

The idea was simple. Dilip Vengsarkar, as chairman of the TRDW, sat in on the selectors' meetings, be it a junior-level one or even the senior selectors picking an A team. He didn't have a vote but his job was to act as advisor and offer his opinions on players being discussed. His views were respected because of the amount of grassroots cricket he - and his team of chief zonal Talent Research Development Officers (TRDOs) - watched.

During that four-year period we saw cricketers emerge from unfashionable parts of the country - MS Dhoni, Irfan Pathan, Parthiv Patel, Piyush Chawla, Sreesanth and RP Singh among them - who were spotted early and then fast-tracked into the A team.

When a new BCCI regime came to power in 2006, the system was not exactly stopped but reformatted, so much so that the match referee had to fulfil the Vengsarkar role - and his salary was double that of the TRDOs on the ground. What has happened since then is that not only are the selections of some players questionable, more than one match-referee appointment has been seen as doubtful.

Nepotism exists and thrives in the local and state associations. It's a malady and we often say that Indian cricket suffers from "son's stroke" at the cost of some proven performers. Some such sons play just a few first-class matches and later make themselves eligible to become selectors and perpetuate the practice.

No one has been able to restructure the zonal selection system, and very often its flaws have a negative effect on players, and increasingly even on selectors.

Recently in Delhi one of the selectors on the junior selection committee, Vinay Lamba, was manhandled by the parents of a young cricketer. In a city full of ministers and bureaucrats, pressure is expected, but these cases of selectors being physically assaulted seem disturbingly to be on the rise.

Certain selections are made to keep the association's voters happy. Vote-bank politics is gradually creeping into the system. I remember when Ajay Ratra was not picked for his state, Haryana, after he had scored a Test century in the West Indies.

In fact, it would be fair to say that selections in India are going from bad to worse. Even the most optimistic would not say that our selection has improved in any way.

Let's go back 25 years. In 1984 the Mumbai selection committee picked a player from Nasik (who was playing in Mumbai) for the Irani Trophy season opener. He was then suddenly dropped, before the first Ranji game. The reason was that the selectors had mixed him up with a much older player - a 37-year-old of the same name, also from Nasik. Only when the 22-year-old showed up did the selectors realise their mistake. The young cricketer suffered from a nervous breakdown and needed psychiatric help before he was able to return to play cricket.

The tragedy is that the situation has not improved. Everyone remembers the story of 1998 when the player selected for the Sahara Cup in Toronto was the allrounder Jai Prakash Yadav, but the man who eventually got there was UP's Jyoti Prasad Yadav, a batsman. The lack of written communication by the secretary of that time was to blame.

If you believe that things are better in the era of the internet and mobile phones and superior communication, don't. In 2002 there was another case when a Mumbai cricketer playing for Goa was enthusiastically discussed in the Mumbai selection committee. His scores were presented and he was selected. When someone amasses more than 500 runs, as this player had, he is always welcome. It was later revealed that the selector had misrepresented the scores, which actually belonged to another Mumbai player also playing for Goa.

The ideal way of putting an end to nepotism and neglect is to appoint some responsible men of repute and integrity, whose fingers are on the pulse of the Indian game. We need to use the experience of people like Vengsarkar and Mohinder Amarnath. They could be overseers or mentors for junior and senior cricket. One of them would do well to supervise the processes and meetings of the selection committee. Indian cricket can do without malpractice in selection and this I believe is the strongest way. Maybe Hyderabad could actually start the process.