Ever since India’s embarrassing exit from the World Cup last year, the Indian cricket team has played a total of 29 players in the format to get to their squad for the upcoming ICC Men’s T20I World Cup 2022. Over the last few months, the Indian side tried a total of 10 openers before finally making it official that they would continue with the same combination of Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul for the World Cup.
While several experts and cricketers criticized Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid for constant shuffling in the playing eleven by highlighting how it may lead to players not feeling confident about their place in the squad. However, Rahul Dravid has said the communication within the team has been very good to avoid the aforementioned.
Yes, in the press conference ahead of the second India-South Africa T20I in Guwahati, Rahul Dravid finally addressed the hot-topic. He said: “I think it’s a little unrealistic to expect us to keep playing the same XI over and over again,”
He added: “Some of the changes or experiments that people like to call them are sometimes forced upon you. If Bumrah doesn’t play the last game, it’s not because we are experimenting. It’s because he gets injured. The five-match series against South Africa in June, we played exactly the same XI in all five matches. People were saying, ‘why don’t they change the XI?’….so I think we can’t win either way.”
“Whatever we do, people are going to say that. But I think in the group and in the team, we are very confident and sure about what we’ve been doing. Sometimes it doesn’t seem very apparent from the outside but there are a lot of things that people outside can’t know. What niggles players are having…how we need to manage the players. If you notice, we were playing a Test match and at the same time we were playing a series in Ireland. So there are many things that go into this.”
With the Indian side sweating it out ahead of the marquee event, Dravid also said that he was confident of the skill set that was present in the 15-member squad announced, despite the injuries to Ravindra Jadeja, and now Jasprit Bumrah. He said:
“You can’t pick the (playing) eleven months in advance, you don’t know the wicket, you don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “We have been very clear about the kind of skills that we want in the fifteen. For me that is very important. The squad that we pick for the T20 World Cup barring injuries, what were the kind of skills we were looking for.”
He added: “In a tournament like the World Cup, you play in five different venues or four different venues in the league stage. And you play against five different teams, so you really need to have that little bit of versatility and flexibility in your squad that allows you to change up things, if you need to against a particular opposition. Yes, over the last few series we haven’t been able to play that squad due to a variety of reasons. And that can happen. But I think most of the guys in the fifteen now have had pretty decent amount of cricket, atleast in the last six months.”
