IND vs ENG 2nd T20: Team India is going through a strange phase in international cricket across formats. Since Virat Kohli stepped down as captain in all formats last year, Team India has seen 7 captains in 7 months. The baton was passed from Kohli to Rohit Sharma, who led vs New Zealand at home. But in South Africa, KL Rahul was the ODI captain. Back in SA home T20 series, the captaincy went to Rishabh Pant. For Ireland T20s, Hardik Pandya was given the opportunity to lead the national side. In between, in the two T20 warm-up games, India were led by Dinesh Karthik. And in the last and fifth Test vs England, India had a new captain in Jasprit Bumrah. There have been several stand-in captains, all due to non-availability of Rohit due to tight scheduling or health issue.
BCCI president Sourav Ganguly has now opened up on the so many captaincy changes, which man fans believe makes Indian cricket look unserious about the sport in the country as there is no one man to lead the country in the sport. Ganguly said that this is happening due to an unavoidable situation.
“I fully agree that it is not ideal to have seven different captains in such a short span of time but it has happened because of unavoidable situation. Like Rohit was all set to lead in South Africa in white ball but before the tour, got injured. So we had KL (Rahul) leading in ODIs and then for this recent SA home series, KL got injured one day before the series would start,” Ganguly told PTI.
He added that head coach Rahul Dravid has to go through a tough challenge with so many captains but it is something that is not in control of anyone.
“In England, Rohit was playing the warm-up game when he had COVID-19. No one is at fault for these situations. The calender is such that we have had to give players breaks and then there have been injuries and we need to factor in workload management also. You got to feel for head coach Rahul (Dravid) as in every series, due to unavoidable circumstances, we have had new captains,” said Ganguly.
