quote:

Originally posted by The One:


i can see the pain with which you have picked sachin, dhoni, dravid, etc

quite the 'fantasy' team

see post above mine

if josh really picks the team he wants to, he would probably drop sachin, sehwag, ganguly, dravid, yuvraj, dhoni, pathan, zaheer, agarkar, kumble, bhajji, etc.

pick a team of talentless 'triers' all led by captain no-hoper kaif

Ah ok...I didn't understand your post even with the reference then.

quote:

Originally posted by Josh C:
Based on the fitness issues and also the need to look at the future, this is the team I would have gone with for the WC:

Kaif (C)
Ganguly
Sachin (if he gets through a thorough physical
Gambhir
Dravid
Karthik (First WK)
Dhoni
Rohit Sharma
S Badrinath
Zaheer
RP Singh
Munaf
Piyush (Tough baptism of fire but the risk)
Bhaji / Powar
Agarkar

Josh,

The purpose of selecting a team for WC is to give yourself best chance to win the cup, not for the cup four years later.

And the chance of Kaif getting Indian captaincy is as good as Boyc's mom playing for England. Ganguly has a better chance of leading India again!

Your obsession of Kaif is reaching new heights by every passing day.

quote:

Josh,

The purpose of selecting a team for WC is to give yourself best chance to win the cup, not for the cup four years later. Roll Eyes

And the chance of Kaif getting Indian captaincy is as good as Boyc's mom playing for England. Ganguly has a better chance of leading India again!

Your obsession of Kaif is reaching new heights by every passing day. Ninja

If Kaif does not get the Indian captaincy it is a loss for India simple as that for me. It is not reaching new heights everyday more like the faith has never wavered.
All this talk about so called talent is just very amusing. India had a much better record in World cricket in between 1970 - 1986 including credible overseas wins and the WC win itself. Talent to me is about match winning not about personal stats which a lot of the so called talented Indian players are masters at accumulating.

And where is Vengarkar's personally chosen Vice Captain. Should he not be with the team if it is just a stiff back ? Perhaps Mrs Vengsarkar is opening another branch.

quote:

Originally posted by The One:
see post above mine

if josh really picks the team he wants to, he would probably drop sachin, sehwag, ganguly, dravid, yuvraj, dhoni, pathan, zaheer, agarkar, kumble, bhajji, etc.

pick a team of talentless 'triers' all led by captain no-hoper kaif

A thorough physical will sort half of them out anyway.

I see you quietly slipped in Agarkar with the some very good players. Nice try

quote:

The purpose of selecting a team for WC is to give yourself best chance to win the cup, not for the cup four years later.

NY, isn't picking a fit bunch of players a pre requisite for that before any talk of capability ?

If players are just selected by stats and reputation we don't need selectors a simple computer program will do. Actually part of me says that a computer program is much better option than Vengsarkar .

About 4 years ago around the time we toured England I recall thinking about how fit and trim the Indian contingent looked. Not sure who was responsible for that, whether it was Wright or Andrew L. Anway it now looks like the bad days have come back with a vengence with most of the current crop having a puffed look about them. Surprisingly Ganguly looks one of the fittest.

Josh. I appreciate some of your views a lot about Indian Cricket and do feel you are a lot like me when it comes to the point of not compromising performance even if it means boycotting the cricket altogether in the hope that someday the fans will demand what results they deserve to see.

But all said and done, your views about Kaif is not making much hay. Kaif has not delivered after the start and the promise he gave. Simple. If captaincy is not about skills alone then Laxman and Kumble are standing much ahead in the que before Kaif can walk out of the waiting list. Laxman has done what even Dravid and Sachin have not done in quite a few tests. He even helped us win the few one dayers we beat Aus at and even the decider of the one day series in Pak in 2004. But at the end of the day, he lacks the consistancy required to get the job done and hence finds himself out of the side. Same goes for Kaif. A couple of good test knocks does not mean he is an automatic situation for the one day side. I have reservations too about idiots like Sehwag. And also about Sachin becoming a FTB late in his career now and would have ideally liked to have dropped him too after the SA tour. But the WC is different and perhaps we have no choice about the players we chose except Sehwag [who proved yesterday against Lanka what an irresponsible lazy clod he is getting run out the way he did].

There is no one else who can do the job, The likes of Sharma have not played any one day game. Piyush has to be thrown in the deep end in a home series and not directly in the WC.

The young ones tried last two years to build a young WC squad failed big time. The likes of Mongia, RP, Venu, Raina, Yadav etc., all failed to be consistantly good and hence the situation will not work out by throwin g more raw players directly in the WC. You may suffer a first round exit in the first round itself against Lanka and Bangals [though I think complacency may do the same with the current squad]. But the team you mentioned would not win a single game in the super 87 format and may only beat out the minnows.

India and all nations together have an understanding with ICC of sending their best squad to the WC and your squad either on form, performance, fitness even hypothetically would not qualify for the binding.

In the end one dayers are not about fielding well or merely about running faster between the wickets or about standing up for 100 overs a day. Thats an important but secondary requirement. It's about good bowling and batting consistantly something your younger players cannot be counted on for in so less and sooner a time.

I am afraid this WC we simply have no choice.
However should the big gunsstruggle again against good sides outside India again like in the past then irrespective of past records, reputations and status, heads should roll and then perhaps your team players can be selected after the WC as replacements to bring some big heads down to Earth.

quote:

Originally posted by Vikas B. Forever:
But the team you mentioned would not win a single game in the super 87 format and may only beat out the minnows.

Typo error. That should read the Super 8 Format. What the hell is wrong with the edit feature.

wots wrong wth josh....???????????

Indian internet fans - all the bandwidth in the world but going nowhere. I've been hearing the same record whose needle is stuck since forever

quote:

Originally posted by 12thman:
Indian internet fans - all the bandwidth in the world but going nowhere. I've been hearing the same record whose needle is stuck since forever

it makes you wonder why people post (ie moan) reams and reams when they have so little belief in the team and system itself. bottom line its just a sport and india have done pretty well over the years considering the lack of fast bowlers which imo is the biggest factor holding us back

looking for conspiracy theories and political reasons every time a squad is selected or india loses a match is quite pathetic tbh

quote:

Originally posted by Ash:

quote:

Originally posted by 12thman:
Indian internet fans - all the bandwidth in the world but going nowhere. I've been hearing the same record whose needle is stuck since forever

it makes you wonder why people post (ie moan) reams and reams when they have so little belief in the team and system itself.

Good point and good question.

The answer is that those people are just as obsessed, if not even more, than the 'masses' they never cease to blast for their foolish obsession. May be they don't even realize that themselves. Self awareness is often elusive - we all struggle with it.

Ah the bile merchant and the simpleton. Nice combo.

The latest "Me, Myself & I" of Indian Cricket Dilipji saw firsthand a few overs delivered by Irfan yesterday and declared him OK to travel to the WC. Why bother with Physios and other experts when we have the Socrates of Indian Cricket himself ?
Also when a journo raised his concern about the Indian fielding standards the colonel replied something on the lines of "But we have the best batting line up". That was as entertaining as seeing Nana Patekar challenge the TV cameraman to record and play-back in a couple of months time his assertion that " India will absolutely win the WC".

Josh, even if India has bad fielding standards currently, there is nothing that can be done at this stage. Simply because fielding will never be the sole criteria which can win you matches. They can never substitute good batting or good bowling. The side that won us the only WC would never pass selection if their fitness or fielding would have been the sole criteria for selecting them.

The people currently who are very good fielders among the youngsters that you want to see playing may save you 20 odd runs per match, undoubtedly, but fact is they can't even score 20 runs consistantly match after match.

Then what would be the point if they can neither bat nor bowl well?

Fielding alone will not win any match. But it is more important than the weighting it is accorded to in Indian Cricket at least by the current set of selectors. Attitude, tenacity, stomach for a fight, team spirit etc. are also not accorded enough weighting in Indian Cricket. As they say in the World my philosophy is that Average talent + good attitude will turn out better results for the team in comparison to Superior talent + shoddy attitude in the long run.

On fielding actually I understand that the 1983 team was quite decent on the field with the likes of Kapil and Madan Lal. In fact at crucial times it came in quite handy like the final where that Viv Richards' catch started the slide for WI.

I meant "As they say in the Corporate World" above .

quote:

Originally posted by Josh C:
Fielding alone will not win any match. But it is more important than the weighting it is accorded to in Indian Cricket at least by the current set of selectors. Attitude, tenacity, stomach for a fight, team spirit etc. are also not accorded enough weighting in Indian Cricket. As they say in the World my philosophy is that Average talent + good attitude will turn out better results for the team in comparison to Superior talent + shoddy attitude in the long run.

On fielding actually I understand that the 1983 team was quite decent on the field with the likes of Kapil and Madan Lal. In fact at crucial times it came in quite handy like the final where that Viv Richards' catch started the slide for WI.

The WC 1983 team has just Madan Lal and Kapil who did well as fielders, before that we had just a Ramnath Parkar of Eknath Solkar. Last 2 decades it was Azhar, Robin, Jadeja, Kaif and Yuvraj. We have to live with that for the time being. Average talent + positive attitude has brought us some really crap players like Raina, Bharadwaj, Deep Dasgupta, Shiv Sunder Das, Nilesh Kulkarni, Sairaj Bahutule, Nikhil Chopra, Wasim Jaffer, S. Ramesh, H. Kanitkar, P. Patel [due to bad keeping], Ajit Agarkar, Hemang Badani, D. Mongia etc. They all had great attitude, stomach for a fight and all that qualities you mentioned, but lacked the most necessary ingredient - The skills or the talent. They all failed to translate their other good qualities in fighting, fielding, potential etc into the only thing that matters = Consistant Performance [Runs/Wickets].

The current team barring selections of Pathan, Sehwag and Karthick [substituting for a specialist batsman without suifficient experience] is the best we have. Even if Sachin and Ganguly score half the amount of runs they did last WC, they will do well.

We have no other choices at the moment since the selection of all these so called fitter, hungrier and younger players has failed miserably on account of mishandling and team mismanagement. However should teh current players repeat their past year inconsistancy and let us down again, post WC they should all be dropped and taught a collective lession in professional committment.

Vikas, We had a lot of victories on our flat dust bowls during the nineties. Other than that what other credible wins did we have in the last 20 years with all this so called talent ? I don't simply equate talent to big averages or aggregates or number of centuries or so called attractive batting as seems to be the case with most Indian fans. It is about winning which we do very little of given all the money and the player pool we have. Need to look at things differently IMO.

Our fortunes turned around favourably in the early 2000s for a while under the Wright / Ganguly combo. Wright brought in the virtues of discipline, fitness and various other aspects that Indians did not take seriously. Gangs brought in an aggressive streak into this team, backed younsters and cut across some of the Zonal biases. The youngsters he backed delivered for a while. He made some very blatant mistakes too like getting Yuvraj to open against Australia and mindless backing of Parthiv for too long.

Now it seems to be back to the old bad days. One or two Zonally influential power hungry cogs hogging the decisions. Selections based on reputations. Fitness/fielding being overlooked in favour of career stats. I cannot see how this will take us forward.

BCCI and Vengsarkar are on fire. Not sure why the Journo is surprised by this. Thackeray saab is perhaps chewing his pan with a contended smile on his face:

link

The reference to Thackarey in the context of Vengsarkar is just a tounge in cheek comment, only to highlight some of the narrow thinking shown by the current chairman of selectors. I am not even making a mild suggestion that those two are in collision to drive a common agenda or anything like that.