"INDIA Tour of Australia: Entire Tour Review"

In-fighting, inertia, whining, excuses: that sums up India's 
horror run on the tour of Australia


NO SUCCESS WITHOUT PEACE: A team with fractured unity can never succeed. This was amply showed by the Indian team in Australia. The team management and BCCI would like us to believe that all's fine, but they are fooling no one. The team is clearly divided, with Dhoni on one side and Sehwag on another. Somebody needs to step up and take responsibility to sit the concerned parties down and make them thrash out their grievances. Only then can the team hope to become a winning unit again.



PREPARE A SUCCESSION PLAN FOR DHONI:
MS Dhoni stated mid-way through the Australia tour that he may retire from Tests at the end of 2013. Going by his tactics and body language, it is apparent Dhoni doesn’t savour the five-day format as much as limited overs cricket. It's time for India to start thinking of Dhoni's successor as Test captain, and the front-runner for that position will be Virat Kohli, who has recently been made vice-captain of the ODI team. A first step towards that would be naming Kohli as Dhoni's
deputy in Test cricket as well.




WHERE IS THE COACH? Duncan Fletcher looks far from confident in his role as coach of the Indian team, and he is being shielded by players who have repeatedly said he is not to blamed for the crushing defeats suffered by the team. Fletcher has worked extra hard to keep himself away from the limelight; but he also appears to have left behind his control freak attitude and being a hard taskmaster since he took over the reins from Gary Kirsten. If Fletcher indeed has the confidence of the dressing room is hard to tell, but he needs to step forward and start doing the job he had been appointed for.





ENOUGH WITH THE WHINING:
"Umpiring decisions have gone against us"; "Technology has failed us"; 
"Let's see if the Australians can win in India"; "We are being abused by the crowd”; 
“The media is to blame” 
— these are some of the many grievances of Indian players. 


Sorry, but their off-field bickering would be more credible if they had put in an honest effort on the field. 


The brash attitude of some younger players— the flipping-the-bird acts in public, celebrating milestones with cuss words — tells you that Indian cricketers need to show class on and off the field. Let your performances do the talking, fellows!







BCCI, STEP UP PLEASE: The Indian cricket board needs to stop living in denial, resting on its laurels. Most of all, it must wake up to the fact that it can’t rationalise the Test team’s failures by pointing to the one-day team’s World Cup win. Enough of ridiculous statements like "All teams struggle away from home" and "Things will be alright when the team plays in India". Its credibility is at a low. And it needs to prove it cares more about ...
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SELECT PLAYERS ON MERIT: If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it is that you can’t select players for their reputation. Harbhajan ‘400 Wickets’ Singh was persevered till he drove himself out of the team. Yet the trend continues with several senior players, and there’s not even a whiff of a shake-up in the team. Form, fitness and match-readiness of players matter more than egos, commercial considerations and the appeasement of zonal higher-ups. When you put merit above all else, the results will start taking care of themselves.





PHASING OUT THE SENIORS: It is naïve to say the out-of-form seniors will ‘bounce back’ and ‘prove their critics wrong.’ 
Such optimism notwithstanding, the unvarnished truth is that these players are nearing their ends. Persevering with them through poor form would certainly bring us to a day when they will have to be pushed out the door — or ‘rested’, as BCCI puts it. 
Play the seniors selectively and rotate them with young players whose time has clearly come. Sure, the young ones will fail a few times. Didn’t these veterans too?









SPOT PLAYERS FOR THE FUTURE: Consider this: Tendulkar (and others from his generation such as Kambli and Manjrekar) would probably have not gotten into the Indian team had Gavaskar not retired in 1987. Similarly, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman would not have made their debuts had India stuck with Manjrekar and Kambli. Also, just a few of these players were instant successes. Laxman in Tests and Tendulkar in ODIs had average records to start with, but they were persevered with. Look where they ended up.






SHOW SOME COURAGE, SELECTORS: The worst that the Krishnamachari Srikkanth-led selection committee can do is do nothing. Unfortunately, that is what it has been doing. The selection committee seems distinctly afraid of doing its own job. It doesn’t have the courage to drop a player, so it ‘rests’ him. It doesn’t have the conviction to haul up senior players for their indiscretions and in-fighting. Worse, so many selections appear to have been made for non-cricketing reasons. Even their only forward-looking decision in recent times — appointing Kohli the vice-captain — was made for the entirely convoluted reason of showing Gambhir who’s boss.

TAKE A CALL ON TENDULKAR’S ODI FUTURE: Individuals are instruments in a team’s success. And there’s been no greater instrument of success for Indian cricket than Tendulkar. But even he has served out his greatest function, which was to help India win the World Cup — and even Tendulkar can’t top that. Now, the question to ask should be this: what more can the Indian team achieve with Tendulkar’s help? Unfortunately, celebrity-worshipping pervades Indian ethos. So the question we hear being asked is this: what more can Tendulkar achieve? Shouldn’t the team’s goals come first? 


Tendulkar must be the only player in the world who ‘selects’ himself. He chooses one-day tournaments to play, and insists on opening the batting. This sometimes means that the most potent opening pair since Greenidge and Haynes — Sehwag and Gambhir — has to be broken up. That would be fine if Tendulkar made loads of runs — he usually does — but he was a miserable failure in the CB Series, often found to be going slow when in the vicinity of personal milestones. Simply, consider this for a moment: does the Indian team want him to play the 2015 World Cup aged 42? If the answer is no, Tendulkar has no business continuing in the one-day team.