Three players offloaded from National Cricket Academy

The Director of the National Cricket Academy, Hanumant Singh, has confirmed that three athletes at the academy have been released, 'partly' on grounds of indiscipline and lack of fitness. Harbhajan Singh, Nikhil Haldipur and Murali Kartik are the three who will not be required any more at the NCA's portals. "Two of them have played at the highest level and the third (Haldipur) has played Duleep Trophy but they failed to set an example to the other boys", Hanumant said in a telephonic conversation from Bombay.

But in the same breath he suggested that the three did not need the academy's support any longer: "They are senior boys who've spent six weeks at the camp and have got sufficient exposure. They are capable of handling themselves now. The junior boys will benefit by this step". The three replacements are Manish Sharma, Rakesh Dhruv (both members of the Under 19 World Cup winning squad) and Nikhil Doru, who had been named in the second batch of 20 trainees scheduled to join the academy in September for three weeks.

Of the 24 players chosen originally to grace the academy, four (Zaheer Khan, Tinu Yohanan, CP Menon and Sallabh Srivastava) were asked to continue their association with the MRF Pace Foundation in Madras while two others have left: Laxmi Ratan Shukla (for domestic reasons) and Yuvraj Singh (who is injured but is expected to rejoin the academy shortly). To make up the numbers, five players from the second batch were added to the academy in its initial days and with three more making the cut now, there are only 12 boys waiting in the wings to join in September.

Hanumant said that the academy which is now in a midterm break will resume its activities after the arrival of Rodney Marsh, who is expected in Bangalore by the 26th of this month. The former Maharajkumar of Banswara said that the intention was for the academy to close down after the second batch is tended to and reopen next year from 15th April. He concluded that he was satisfied with the progress made by the boys in all aspects of the game although since this was the maiden session of the academy, he did not have any benchmark to compare the progress with. Hanumant specially commended Sunil Gavaskar, Syed Kirmani and Erapalli Prasanna for the 'terrific inputs' they had provided.