By Arjun Singh, IANS
Durban : Nothing can be greater than an India-Pakistan encounter on a cricket field. But there was something else too that was bothering the Indian camp Friday at the team hotel, Southern Sun Elangani, here.
Back home, Rahul Dravid had relinquished captaincy of both forms of cricket and team manager Sunil dev was a much-harried man. The phone in his room (no. 1420) had been ringing incessantly and there wasn’t much he could manage by way of a response.
India’s Twenty20 captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni was having breakfast with Piyush Chawla and Rudra Pratap Singh and just as he came out of the restaurant, over-zealous reporters accosted him for a reaction.
“We are really focusing on this big game that is coming up. Right now that is our main priority,” was all that Dhoni was prepared to say.
And as had been happening all through the recent series in England, once again Dravid had got his timing wrong.
In the hotel lobby, reporters were coming up with all sorts of bizarre theories as to why Dravid had quit.
It was always on the cards, said one. One had seen that coming, said another. While yet another felt that there was something sinister behind all this. All is not well with the team and no one quits the captaincy of the Indian team just like that.
And then there was the logical extension to that question as well: After Dravid, who?
The next three series of the Indian cricket team are all tough ones – seven matches at home against Australia, then three Tests and five one-dayers against Pakistan also at home, and then the gruelling tour of Australia.
It would be an extremely brave, even audacious, man who would hold his hand up and say that he will pick up the gauntlet now, was the consensual view. It’s too early for Dhoni to be made captain of all three forms of cricket, and Sachin Tendulkar – well nobody quite knows whether he is really interested in becoming the captain again or not.
So the wheel could have turned full circle and we can have Sourav Ganguly back at the helm once again. That seems like the logical short-term solution, unless the board can come up with some other magic formula.