Captain MS Dhoni and his five undroppables

3. Ravindra Jadeja

CSK Player # 2

The only true team that he has ever known.

Ravindra Jadeja is a fairly straight-forward player; one look at his face whenever he is batting or bowling or fielding and the only thing that you will notice is that he has a blank expression almost all the time. He fails to crack under pressure and is unperturbed by lack of form, which bothers the lesser mortals surrounding him, and he makes absolutely no qualms about his smartness.

And all these things are not chance happenings. It is only because Sir Jadeja doesn’t over-complicate things; he just fails to think. Why else, pray answer me, the first thing after entering his restaurant would you see a Chennai Super Kings jersey, and not an Indian one, in that ridiculous garish yellow colour emblazoned on the wall? Talk about interior decoration.

Regardless of his mental aspect, Jadeja had a disastrous 2012, where he averaged Bradman-esque with the ball and Jadeja-esque with the bat but turned it around in style in 2013, where he was by far India’s most impactful ODI player. His recent run of form shows that he has matured even more as a cricketer and is the only player on this list who should be selected on the team-sheet without any reservations whatsoever.

4. Ishant Sharma

Ishant Sharma – Targets no bar

Ishant Sharma is every cricketing country’s FDI to India. Being a politically uninterested, socially unaware person, I wouldn’t be surprised if all the FDI hullaballoo in press has something to do with him. Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if all these inflation talks have anything to do with him. To just imagine Ishant Sharma having a say in our political setup is downright scary, let alone him being a part of the Indian national team.

After a lot of internal turmoil and hastily arranged support-staff meetings, MS Dhoni finally had the guts to drop Ishant Sharma in the recently held India-Australia ODI series, but the lanky underperformer-of-the-century Sharma made a comeback to the national set-up without playing even a single List A game.

The only Ranji Trophy match Ishant played before being called back again was against Haryana (a team that got relegated, eventually), one in which he managed to pick up 9 wickets. The other part of the story was of course that he had 5 lower-order dismissals to his name. After making a comeback, he promptly set the stage on fire and shockingly took two 4-wicket hauls (none of which resulted in a victory) before cushioning it with mediocre performances on either side. Faith was once again restored in the universe.