It is in its utter simplicity that cricket attracts and bewilders in equal measure. Good teams do simple things well and teams in strife lose sight of that very simplicity. India’s cricketers have the ability but at the moment their minds are heavy. “Stay there and the runs will come” their coaches would have once told them as ours did. But ‘staying there’ doesn’t seem to hold any fascination; the complicated upper cut seems more thrilling. Sometimes a little stroll is better than being on a dodgy roller-coaster.

Not surprisingly then India’s selectors who met yesterday as much to pick a Test team as to mollify an outraged nation had very little to work with. Nobody, absolutely nobody, was hammering the door down, was forcing himself to be picked. Like an author commissioned to write a 700-word novel and finding his plot complete on page 232, the selectors have had to go searching for players to fill places. You know instinctively that the malady is deeper.

And so with selections forced on them, the selectors have had to come up with a confused looking line-up. Gambhir and Ganguly are the batting replacements and you can’t help thinking whether both are better one-day players than Test cricketers. Ganguly’s is the more interesting selection and I only hope that the media hype around it will not make life even more difficult for him.

We cannot view Ganguly, as we cannot VVS Laxman, as this shining knight charging out with sword in hand to take on six hundred of the opposition. And some in his camp! Ganguly’s return can neither be a media event nor can we look upon it through the eyes of romantic scriptwriters. There isn’t one of us who wouldn’t want him to stride out and score big runs in the first test but like every one else he will have to adjust to the difference in pitches in very little time, for modern itineraries frown upon acclimatisation. He cannot be burdened with media hype and now that he has been picked we must wish him well, his selection can no longer be an issue till the series is over when it can be analysed with a calm mind and no agenda.

... contd.