India's 2015 World Cup squad: The blame lies beyond Stuart Binny and Yuvraj Singh

Is the cupboard good enough to close the door on Yuvraj? (In pic – Ambati Rayudu)

Stats can take a backseat

It’s not like we have an AB de Villiers at No.4 (Kohli is No.3). So, you got to compare Yuvraj with those who compete with him for his spot: Ajinkya Rahane and Ambati Rayudu. Rahane looks a misfit in the middle order. Rayudu doesn’t seem assured against the swing and bounce. Neither of them can clear bigger boundaries: a basic requirement for a player who bats at that position. For Raina, it is too high to escape the bouncer trap. Dhoni wouldn’t promote himself for reasons best known to him.

The pitches are flattening, but the boundaries still remain the same. You need players with power. And regarding his career numbers outside Asia, maybe, just maybe, there is more to him than what the stats say.

Not many players can boast of ending up as the Man-of-the-tournament in three World Cup winning campaigns: Under-19 World Cup 2000, T20 World Cup 2007, ODI World Cup 2011. Not many would have foreseen him doing the support cast to Sachin Tendulkar in the Chennai Test match against England on a Day 5 pitch; he ended up scoring an unbeaten 131-ball 85 to help India chase down 387 runs.

Not many players can turn a match on its head as he did in the WC T20 2007 semi-final, against Australia at Durban. When he came in, the scoreboard was reading 42-2 in 8 overs and Australia had taken a stranglehold of the game. He went on to change the course of the match with a 30-ball 70. When he left, India were 155-4 in 17.3 overs.

And how can one forget the Yuvraj-Kaif Lord’s classic in 2002?

Whichever way, the fact still stands: he didn’t do much on the field in the lead up to the World Cup to get picked. But was it his fault alone? Was Yuvraj’s comeback into international cricket arena worked out properly? I believe he was rushed back, and that in turn has left his cricketing career in a state of disarray. 33 is not an age to be thrown out of the set-up.

Yuvraj's comeback was botched up

4 months after coming back from the United States, in September 2012, Yuvraj was representing India in a T20 match against New Zealand. He wasn’t part of the IPL. He wasn’t asked to prove his fitness in the domestic circuit. He wasn’t put to test in India A tours, especially with the Champions Trophy and World Cup away from home. He was picked solely on reputation and sentiments. As expected, he struggled his way through the matches, yet managed to play two T20 World Cups. And that stretch of poor run has now accounted for his spot in the tournament that matters the most.

Would things have been different had his resurgence been planned? How would it have been had he played a season of domestic cricket, IPL, and India A tours before playing his first international match? Anyone who has tracked his career would be able to tell that he was back to his best towards the latter stages of the 2014 IPL. The fluency in shot making returned, and it took some time coming. You don’t expect a player to go through intensive chemotherapy and start playing as he did before he fell sick. This is where the selectors missed a trick.

He had to struggle for a year or so. Unfortunately for him, those struggles now count as a failure in the international circuit. Had they come in domestic matches, it would have been looked at as a recovery road. But not anymore.

How do you rate Yuvraj the limited overs player? To me, he is a match-winner on good batting decks, capable of taking apart any bowling attack. It doesn’t make sense if you demand him to prove himself on turners and green wickets. He has hardly done it, and he will hardly do it now.

But what separates him from batsmen who just feast on flat decks is that he rises to the occasion when the stakes are high. You can bring anything – the bowlers, the pitch, it wouldn’t matter; he will win matches for you. And that’s more than enough. Not everyone can be a Sachin Tendulkar or a Rahul Dravid.

Not just Yuvraj, be it Uthappa, Tiwary or Vijay, we never had plans for any of them. And here is why I think the selectors and the team management are at fault, not just the players.

Was the Indian team ever on track?

Kuldeep Yadav

What were we doing with Kuldeep Yadav a couple of months back? The 20-year-old was fast-tracked into the national team for the series against West Indies on the back of an excellent IPL and U-19 World Cup in 2014, only for him to be dropped for the very next series without being given a single chance. When we already have three spinners in Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel, what was the need for the fourth? And that too only 3.5 months ahead of the World Cup, which is to be held in conditions that hardly assist spin?

So, what if he had got a chance and picked a 5-for? Would he have been picked ahead of the 3? Or will we go into the tournament with 4 spinners in the squad? Depending on oppositions, Australia don’t even play a single spinner in their team – which shows how ‘big’ a role slow bowlers will play in the tournament.

Go back a little further. What made the selectors pick Sanju Samson for the England limited-overs leg in 2014? Again, Samson was a pick based on IPL and U-19 exploits. Again, he wasn’t given a single opportunity and dropped for the very next series. What does this indicate? Were these panic moves looking at India’s performances in South Africa and New Zealand, where the team had looked out of sorts?

Were these players pushed by the selectors against the will of the team management? It raises a lot of uncomfortable questions.

The team’s unwillingness to experiment at the right time meant they had to base their World Cup campaign on players who had cemented their places in the side based on home exploits. This team is more or less the same team that won the Champions Trophy in 2013. In England, India were helped by tracks that assisted spin, which made sure Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja dictated the terms. The duo bowled 82 overs in the tournament, picking up 20 wickets for 335 runs at just over 4 runs per over.

Shiva Jayaraman, writing for ESPNcricinfo, observed: “The stats seem to validate the premise - the average and the strike rate of spin bowlers in this Champions Trophy were the best in all the editions of the tournament - and that is an interesting evidence considering that three of the seven editions have been played in the subcontinent.”

Don't expect the favour to be repeated this time around.

The biggest mistake

What was the use of the quadrangular A-team one-day series that was held in Australia in July-August 2014? Neither the team’s leading run-getter, Samson, nor the leading wicket-taker, Dhawal Kulkarni, has been picked for the World Cup. While Samson never got a chance, Kulkarni, despite picking up 8 wickets in the 3 ODIs he played after the series, has been dropped too.

On the other hand, Robin Uthappa, who took IPL 2014 by storm, was found out in the quadrangular series as an opener. Could he have been better as a floater, especially with the team struggling to find its No. 4? I believe he would have been an exciting addition to the squad. But how do we know? The management didn’t even think about testing him in any other alternative role.

Did the selectors really think Yuvraj wasn’t good enough to be on the list of the best 30 players in the country? Assuming he had made it to the 30-man squad, would he have been picked for the World Cup – given his form in the build up to the tournament? Again, how do we know? The selectors didn’t even entertain that possibility.

Kedar Jadhav, the most dynamic among all our No. 4 options, wasn’t anywhere close to making the squad too. The right-hander was the second-leading run-scorer for India A in the quadrangular series despite only playing 4 of the 7 matches: 3 fifties in 4 innings at an average of 56.25 and a strike-rate of 119.68.

Thanks to the selectors and the team management, the defending champions enter the World Cup without knowing what their best playing XI is in those conditions – and the effect is there for everyone to see, with the team losing its first two ODIs in the ongoing tri-series, to Australia and England respectively.

The blame sure does lie beyond Stuart Binny and Yuvraj Singh.