Former Indian captain Anil Kumble
As per Kumble, the pressure during the IPL matches is sort of diverse as one is performing for his respective franchise. The situation here can be somewhat intense; with the players feeling more relaxed when they went back into an Indian setup and it cost them too. Though odd, it made sense, that the team was not prepared after the IPL hectic schedule.
Kumble added further that the situation is critical with the team handling their fast pacers during the tournament, with Praveen Kumar leaving in between the series and Zaheer Khan struggling with something or the other and even Ashish Nehra, as a matter of fact, on his own was not as per the high expectations. The entire selection process went incorrect in Barbados when the team included one additional batsman to their team. One mistake was with India not showing any expectation or faith from Vinay Kumar on a wicket offered both bounce and carry, for which Kumble got worried.
Further, the management of the entire team too were incapable of nurturing fast bowling talents. If looked precisely, at the number of players turning out for India over the past few years, the quality is there, but the much needed players have disappeared with the likes of Sreesanth and RP Singh completely out of the selection process. Moreover, there is no news about Munaf Patel or Ishant Sharma and Irfan Pathan, all of whom are the best players to have gone and disappeared from the selector’s sight.
Anil feels that what we need now is to look at how we are handling the pacemen in our team, like we picked Abhimanyu Mithun, the last one dayer against South Africa for the Indian A team. Also, Mithun should have been picked for the Zimbabwe tour, and this is a mistake of wrongly picking of the players for the ODIs based only on their IPL performances rather than bowling performances. The part of bowling ten over’s and four is totally different picture here.
Kumble also is of the view that India had missed a trick in not including the name of Irfan Pathan with his exceptional credentials as a seam bowling all rounder. Rather than that, India got charged with Pathan and Ravindra Jadeja both spinning all-rounders who were unimpressive with the ball during the time of the match. In the case of Irfan, it is worrying fact that India having such good players with spinning allrounders, don’t select him while the players are perfectly fit to be here and there, and they need someone similar like Shane Watson of the Australian team or Jacques Kallis of the South African team.
Ultimately, Anil added that India paid for their lack of flexibility in the department of batting, with sending Pathan out when the Sri Lankan team had amazing spinners. The Indian team simply needed some player to get a 20 ball 50. Also, Dinesh Karthik the batsman in the middle for the team would have been useful in Barbados, with his amazing ability to play the rising ball. Kumble thinks that India need to ensure that the guys in their team should adapt to the bouncing ball or have to select people who play the cricket game rather dedicatedly. Kumble is of the view that the mindset of the team despite knowing the fact what they needed rather than pondering on such and such players performance is meaningless. Also, they need to observe the Sri Lankan team that focused on winning than looking at scoring 143 runs.