Sehwag's in the team ahead of other batsmen not only to bowl his offies, but also to add some much needed experience to the top order. He's done the typical Sehwag thing of looking pretty good at the top of the ODI order and then getting out, but given the absolutely paper-thin nature of the batting lineup, filling it with even more youngsters probably isn't the move, nor is dropping the youngsters selected originally after so few games.
To put it bluntly, teams selecting less than their best team deliberately really pisses me off. I tried really hard to close my eyes and buy into the fact that Ganguly and Dravid were dropped because their replacements were deemed to add more to the team as a whole with their fielding, and not because of their age, but when Munaf Patel makes the team, all consistency is lost. Once you start rotating the farcically selected team as well, that's just a bit much, isn't it? If we're going to be real here, Tiwary and Raina shouldn't even really be in the squad at all, so I'm sure they'll gladly take their opportunities to be part of the team setup, do a bit of fielding and be ready waiting to get a farcical ODI cap if someone goes down or looks completely out of sorts.
For all the talk of Twenty20 being a massive threat to ODIs, I think they are their own biggest enemy. There are far too many of them and the ongoing belief that none of them matter except the World Cup has been passed on from selectors' actions to fans' realisations themselves. The games should be used as more than giving player X an opportunity or blooding player Y and the fact that they really aren't is going to hurt what is actually a semi-decent format.
Oh, and I apologise for being slightly aggressive/sarcastic in my post yesterday; I was in a really ****ty mood and all my posts ended up a bit like that, whether I intended them to be or not.
