Goodbye to the Golden Oldies of Indian Cricket?

This topic came by when I was listening to an FM program as I was driving this morning. The RJ was discussing the debacle – The Indian tour of Australia, with a couple of so-called cricket experts. One gentleman claimed that ‘Dhoni is extremely selfish’; his reason being that, Dhoni wanted to phase out the quartet of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS laxman and Sourav Ganguly as soon as he took on the Captain-ship mantle. While I believe it is a load of bollocks, India’s recent struggles away from home has indeed raised lots of questions about the senior players. And the gentleman on the radio was making such bold observations such as ‘Dhoni claiming to retire from 1 format of the game by 2013 is nothing but a hint to the senior players to retire‘ and ‘Sachin, VVS, Dravid and Zaheer should retire ASAP‘. I know arm-chair punditry is easy, but with the rumblings from the BCCI in the media that hints not so subtly at Laxman’s axing/retirement prior to the 4th test, I thought of examining this objectively.

I thought performance over the past 25 innings would be a fair sample size. The following table summarizes our batsmen’s performances over the last 25 innings.

stats courtesy: ESPN Cricinfo

Over the past 25 innings, we can see that 5 out of our top 7 have averaged below (in some cases well below) their career averages; the only exception being Rahul Dravid. Now before you guys hit me with the law of averages theory, I would like to point out to a couple of things..

1. It might be erroneous to compare the averages of batsmen who vary in terms of overall experience, age, opposition and batting positions.

2. So the comparisons have been made in such a way that the performance of a given batsman is compared with his overall performance. No two batsmen are compared with each other.

3. The last column indicates the percentage of the sample size as against the batsman’s overall career innings. For example, Tendulkar’s performance over his past 25 innings is indicative of just the last 8.09% of his overall performance, whereas Gambhir’s represents the last 29.41% of his overall performances.

It seems like the 3 older players in Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman have not performed below par recently (numbers don’t lie and all that jazz..), in-fact, Dravid has been performing very consistently in the considered sample size. Though a 100 eludes him, Sachin Tendulkar has been contributing 46 runs every innings on an average in his past 25 innings. From the above table you could also make a case for VVS – he has been scoring a score of 50+ every 3 innings, but the other factor that has to be taken into account is he has been registering only a single digit score every 2.5 innings, ie., he scores a single digit score more frequently than a score of 50+, clearly the signs of a player on his wane. But, is it the position and performance that has to be reviewed so critically by all and sundry in the country? I guess more than anything else, it is his age that is working against him. VVS is 37 – the youngest of the oldies. But he neither has the near immortal status of Tendulkar nor has he performed as consistently as Dravid, making his position in the team a tad expendable. But all the hype and the hoopla in the media about Laxman either being sacked or forced to retire is an exercise in futility to mask the team’s overall underachievement and also the lack of foresight from the selectors.

I’m of the firm belief that a batsman’s place in the team should be considered only on a series by series basis once he crosses 34 or 35 which would give the team an opportunity of getting in a suitable and permanent replacement within 2 years of the said batsman’s retirement. India still do not have a permanent No. 6, even 3 years after Sourav Ganguly’s retirement. Kohli seems to have clung on to the position at least for the near future after experiments with Suresh Raina, Subramaniam Badrinath, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and bizarely even Wriddhiman Saha given a chance at 6. If not for his last 2 knocks, even Kohli’s position was under threat and with Dhoni missing the Adelaide test,which would have created enormous problems in terms of selection.

But there is another problem that India has – the opening pair. India’s current permanent combination of Sehwag and Gambhir’s performances over the past 25 innings doesn’t amount to a pleasant reading. Neither of the batsmen have managed to cross a score of 100 in 50 innings combined. Between them, they have registered single digit scores 15 times which is almost 1 in every 3 innings – definitely not a comforting statistic. Sehwag especially has been grossly under-performing in his past 25 innings. His average of 32 is well below his career average of 50 and his reckless shot-making has left the team in trouble in more occasions than one. The opening combination is something the selectors should concentrate on immediately as their collective failures recently has exposed the middle order to the newer ball early and subsequently to the middle order batsmen’s failures as well.

Captain Cool hasn’t been making great strides with his test match batting recently. He averages just 26 in his past 25 innings, which incidentally is almost 25% of his career. Dhoni might actually be better served if he decides to take a bow from the longer format of the game. At least he could prolong his career in the ODIs and T20s. I believe India would be better served if the seniors retire one by one – Laxman’s head is almost on the chopping block but without a proper replacement. Is it going to be Rohit Sharma or Ajinkya Rahane or Suresh Raina or some other youngster? There is no clarity and this is because none of the above have had any substantial run in with the team. Sachin should score his 100th ton and quit followed by Dravid. Sehwag shouldn’t be given plethora of chances from this point on.

Anyways this is just my point of view. What’s yours? I’m interested to know.

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