T20 Asia Cup: Team India should play those in form and not just go by seniority

There is not much point if someone ln red-hot batting form like Deepak Hooda is kept out of the playing eleven in the ongoing T20 Asia Cup or the subsequent T20 World Cup due to the focus being on rehabilitating K L Rahul who just hasn’t been able to get going after returning from an injury in the IPL. Hooda has done consistently well in every T20 international he has played in earlier this summer when Team India toured first Ireland and then England. Like K L Rahul, Hooda is a good fielder but he has also been used as a part-time off-spinner, both in the IPL and in T20 internationals (T20is).

If slots in the playing eleven are reserved on the basis of seniority, then it will be difficult for any youngster in form to find a place in the team and contribute if the focus is just on getting first the older Kohli (who will be 34 on November 5) and then the 30-year-old K L Rahul into form. If nothing else, the ongoing Asia Cup has once again indicated that the finals need not be an India-Pakistan affair. With the kind of performances Afghanistan has been clocking to reach the last four in the ongoing Asia Cup, India has to play its best team and cannot keep resting on its seniority or past laurels, whether it is batting or bowling. If, for instance, the India pacer Avesh Khan goes for plenty against Hong Kong which was bundled out by Pakistan, that surely should sound the warning bells.

With a trend of more and more cricketers being unable to play on medical grounds, whether due to injuries or Covid, the traditional logic of trying to get players back into form by persisting with them just doesn’t make sense beyond a point, especially in the shortest form of the game. Which is why England has dropped its senior and out-of-form opening batsman Jason Roy from its T20 squad for next month’s World T20 tournament even while also being forced to omit the injured Bairstow. The rationale is that, for next month’s T20 World Cup in Australia, England cannot keep indulging in the luxury of continuously blocking a pace in the squad for Jason Roy on the basis of seniority alone. Which does not mean that this is the end of the T20 international road for Jason Roy who can always make a comeback, given the increasing number of domestic tournaments in the shortest form of the game, whether T20 or the ongoing Hundred tourney in England.

England, of course, have different coaches for Tests (Brendon McCullum) and white-ball cricket (Matthew Mott who was the coach for the seemingly invincible Aussie women’s team). Like players in this day and age of Covid, coaches are also not immune, going by the initial reports that Rahul Dravid would not be able to accompany India’s Asia Cup squad after testing positive. Just when the BCCI was thinking of sending V V S Laxman as the coach, Dravid recovered.

However, given the increasingly crowded schedule of international cricket (and not just multilateral tournaments but bilateral series), the BCCI could perhaps realize that one coach cannot be the man for all seasons.

Neither can seniority alone be the criterion for blocking places in India’s T20 squad while benching younger and fitter players who are in red-hot form. Remember India won its first and only T20 World Cup in 2007 with a new captain and a young team minus the then senior super stars like Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman.

Which is why, coming back to the ongoing Asia Cup, the expert commentator Gautam Gambhir has not just been emphasizing the need to play the in-fom Deepak Hooda but also questioning the logic of replacing Rishabh Pant (who will be 25 on October 4) in the playing eleven against Pakistan on August 28 with the far more senior 37-year-old Dinesh Karthik.