Academic commitments now done, I can now get back here. Please don't discuss typical Indian team selections on this thread. It's dedicated to Indian domestic cricket. Solutions thrown up by the domestic season may be mentioned. And there are many.
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First-Class Season wrap, 2006-07
This has been an eventful season, complete with heroes, controversies successes, disappointments and even a few laugh lines, especially from a forgotten hero from Delhi. The Duleep Trophy had some real competition from abroad, with Sri Lanka sending a full-strength reserve team that forced its way to the finals with two victories. That wasn't enough to stop North Zone from winning it.
Mumbai, with 36 Ranji titles to their credit but two years without a title, have had a very inconsistent season, starting dreadfully but for a turnaround against Gujarat, on the back of which they stormed into the semis, then the finals. Their final lineup, with Tendulkar, Jaffer, Zaheer, Agarkar and Powar, looked likely to win the final, and Title Number 37. And they did.
They have played like a team, with every player, one to eleven, frontlines to reserves, creating value in the team. Even as the Indian team's fielding was declining, the Mumbai team's was good, throughout the season, primarily due to the presence of several youngsters in the team. While the all-round abilities of off-spinner Powar and wicketkeeper Samant (limited as this may seem) were never in doubt, two youngsters, Wilkin Mota and Abhishek Nair, were very impressive with bat, ball and on the field. Nair is a middle-order batsman not averse to playing a big innings and is also a hard hitter of the ball, but more importantly, he's also bowled long stocks of medium-pace to support the strikers. Wilkin Mota, a swing bowler, has often scored vital runs in the lower order, as familiar stories of the top six falling quickly and the tail-end rescuing them came true again.
On the other hand, out in the North, the talented Delhi team's fortunes began to decline. Some of their players are exceptionally talented. However, they have not done well as a team, with a string of lost points and a defeat pushing them off the top spot. This team has been plagued with bad selections, and a recent CricInfo article shows how selectors are cheated into getting a few players into age group teams. The DDCA, the local association, is once again proven corrupt and incompetent, and cricket in the capital suffered. So much, that their very own star players are contemplating shifting elsewhere.
Virender Sehwag, in the news for the wrong reasons, has contemplated shifting to Haryana, and even Akash Chopra may do so, while our forgotten hero may go to Maharashtra. While it would be interesting to see how a Maharashtra attack with Nehra and Munaf performs, it's definitely a tragedy for this team that has contributed some of India's best players in history. One may feel for the tall young seamer Ishant Sharma, who's an obvious India prospect post-World Cup, stuck in a hopeless team.
Haryana was one unfortunate team, who were sunk into Plate by the fault-ridden, counter-productive first-innings-lead point system. That said, their batting was dreadfully inept, with a yougn middle-order batsman opening the innings. This team isn't even half as problem-ridden as Delhi, nor are they over-rated like the newly-promoted Saurashtra, but one player who will suffer is Joginder Sharma. After his team was relegated, and he only got one match, the selectors dropped him without hesitation. Given their aversion to picking Plate league players, he may never get another match, unless Haryana return to the Elite league (possible, once Sehwag turns up).
That Saurashtra actually won two matches and we saw so many draws shows that the much-touted Elite league hasn't had the best of cricket played. As mentioned in an article in The Sportstar, the less-talented (we may believe) Plate league has shown a lot more competition, and players play for a purpose, and for their teams, not their places in the teams. Services batsman Yashpal Singh scored heavily once more. He's scored well playing in all events, against even tougher teams before the Elite/Plate division in the tournament. But playing for a Plate side has weakened his chances of a national call-up, while some raw youngster from Mumbai barely 20 years old is already an India prospect.
This season has its fair share of heroes, some of them young, some of them who play roles which are vital in the national side. The Indian Test team's opening worries seem to have returned, and come to the ODI side as well. Robin Uthappa of Karnataka leads this season's runs tally with over a thousand. He's young, very effective on the field, and unusually, scores at a strike rate typical of hard-hitting all-rounders. More importantly, despite being a prospect for one-dayers, he's good enough to open in the longer version as well. While Ganguly may have got all the attention, his Bengal teammate Manoj Tiwari also scored heavily, over 900, and was also very sharp in the field. He's another prospect for the Indian ODI side after the World Cup, given the wide gap between India's best ODI batsmen or bowlers and their best fielders. Likewise Rohit Sharma of Mumbai, but he's still too young and raw for an India berth.
The strike seamer issue continues to dog the Indian team, and will keep on, as long as the Test seamers are frequently chopped and changed and little Agarkar is India's best ODI seamer. The season has thrown in a solution from an odd corner: Bengal. Ranadeb Bose, a giant swing bowler from Bengal, has been bowling long spells regularly, moved the ball off the pitch and through the air to good effect, even beating the bat more than a few times. His fielding may not be good enough for ODI's now, but may improve as he still has age and energy on his side. Lack of pace is evident in the speed-gun readings, but pace isn't everything, at least as long as the bowler at the other end is bowling fast enough. That bowler, however, is hard to find in India. And of course, there's Joginder Sharma, who's been among the top ten run-scorers and also a leading wicket-taker, and very effective on the field bar that one ODI he got, but nobody wants him in the side.
The Ranji Trophy has been a success overall, especially when it's produced a few stars and possible India players, but the Ranji OD series continues to get worse each season. We find matches played in club grounds, or in places with bad weather, in whites and with a red ball even as that's now a thing of the past, and most of the OD players are just plain mediocre and have no shot of even a Zonal team, let alone National. One can only hope all of that changes, and the Ranji heroes replicate their form here in the one-dayers as well.
