Is it time to drop Shikhar Dhawan from the Indian team?

For a decade and a half, Virender Sehwag enthralled the cricketing world with his unique style of batting. The bowler never mattered to him, the ball did; regardless of where it was pitched, if it was meant to be hit, he went for it with aplomb.

But for everybody, there comes a time when the good days are few and far between. And after the 2011 World Cup, you could see Sehwag was no longer the batsman he once was. The hand-eye coordination, such a key aspect of his batting, had lost its cutting edge, and eventually he was dropped from the home series against Australia in 2013.

His replacement was another man from Delhi. Shikhar Dhawan had waited on the fringes for quite some time, and he finally got an opportunity to wear the India whites at Mohali in the third match of four-match Test series.

He announced his entry on the international stage in a style that can only be described as fearless, smashing his way to a whirlwind 187. With this innings, he gave Indian cricket fans a sign that maybe it was time to move on from Sehwag.

Dhawan went to England a few months later and gave the same treatment to whichever opposition India faced, scoring 363 runs and winning the Man-of-the-Tournament award in India’s invincible 2013 Champions Trophy campaign.

It seemed like we had indeed seen the maturing of a player who had promised so much at the 2004 Under-19 World Cup and who was finally ready to take the next step.

But teams in international cricket today figure out deficiencies in a player’s game much faster than before, thanks to the advent of technology. And so when Dhawan went to South Africa later that year, the trio of Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander began slanting the ball across him; with a leg-stump guard that he usually takes, the strategy was always going to land him in trouble.

That's precisely what it did in the second innings of the Johannesburg Test where, to a short of good length delivery, Dhawan went for the horizontal cut short and was caught in the slips.

You would think that he was prone to such dismissals with that guard and he would look to make changes in order to ensure he doesn’t get out in that manner again. That is the quality that separates a good player from a very good player, as a certain Virat Kohli would tell you.

But sadly, that hasn’t been the case. The left-hander has persisted with that leg-stump guard and has been found wanting. None more so than by James Anderson, who with his probing line on the corridor of uncertainty has dismissed Dhawan on numerous occasions.

For any opener and in particular an aggressive opener, one of the bread-and-butter shots that is the cut. Sanath Jayasuriya is a name that comes to the mind immediately when you talk about a batsman at the top who loved to thread and smash the ball through the point region.

Dhawan, too, is someone who likes it when the ball is short. After the cover drive, it is the cut that fetches him the highest proportion of his runs.

But Dhawan will himself admit that along with it being a strength of his, the cut has also been a weakness in recent times. In trying to score boundaries early on, he has tried to cut the balls that are too close and nicked them to the keeper.

It is an area where he has shown very little improvement and as a result, he has come across as someone who is reckless and doesn’t put as much value on his wicket as he should.

The third area where most coaches tend to put emphasis nowadays is game awareness. What is the pitch like? What are shots or deliveries that I should play or bowl? Which bowler will be the most threatening? These are aspects which good players always take into consideration when they are out there in the middle.

Take the example of India’s opening World T20 match against New Zealand in Nagpur. On a pitch turning square, the hosts had restricted the Black Caps to 126 and looked on course to get their campaign off to a winning start.

But Dhawan it seemed had other ideas. Any batsman who has played any form of cricket will tell you that on a turning pitch it is the straight delivery which is most dangerous. In such a scenario, he tried to sweep a straight ball from Nathan McCullum for a not-so-important single and was judged leg-before-wicket.

Now had he been observing the action on the field, then he would most certainly have avoided that shot, considering the nature of the pitch.

Most good players assess conditions and make the necessary adjustments accordingly to succeed in varying conditions. Dhawan, however, doesn’t seem to take note of the conditions at hand.

India are scheduled to play 5 overseas Tests at least in the next 3 months and with an unstable Number 3, a good opening duo is desperately needed to provide assurance for the rest of the line-up. KL Rahul has shown that he does possess the ability, and Gautam Gambhir and Ajinkya Rahane too have shown that they can be good choices at the top, especially when the ball is moving a bit.

It’s time India started giving the others a look, at least until Dhawan realises his mistakes and comes back as a better player.