CricDigs Blogs

The first test match between India and England has brought forward one question often asked from the Indian team. Why they still don’t have a decent all-rounder? There are two ways of looking at this question. One view is that although there isn’t someone like Flintoff in the Indian team, the likes of Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer have been pulling in their weight with some good batting scores. Further, as far as the fifth bowling option goes, Sehewag and Yuvraj could be a useful combination. This way the team has a genuine batsman at number seven in the form of Dhoni.

The other way of thinking is that the team needs to have one genuine match-winning all-rounder. One really can’t expect every batsman to struggle against Yuvraj’s bowling the way Pietersen has been doing and even Sehewag is still more of a part-time option. The presence of a genuine, worldclass all-rounder would mean that there are still teeth in the number five/six bowling options and the number seven batter has the ability to score a qick 40 – 60 odd when needed. Some time back, it looked like Irfan Pathan would solve this puzzle for the Indian team but he has had one of the most dramatically dented young careers that can be remembered. He isn’t even a shadow of what he was before — he is bowling slow off-cutters these days and his much fabled swing has vanished.

The very idea of accommodating an all-rounder (if they can find one) in the Indian squad could itself raise a lot of questions. Who should be dropped? It has to be Yuvraj Singh unless he can pull of some whirlwind centuries in the immediate future. There is a strange concept that appears to have entered the Indian selectors’ mindset. They seem obsessed with having a pace bowler who can bat well. First it was the supposedly superiorly talented Agarkar and then Irfan was called the next Kapil Dev. What about trying out a spinning all-rounder? Is that such a bad thing to have in your team?