Did Kolkata miss a trick in team selection? Tue, Mar 16 2010,
Saurabh Somani
Before this match started, if Kolkata had done their homework, they would have known that Chennai's batting was much more powerful than their bowling, and that therefore Kolkata would have to first pick a strong bowling side, and then use the remaining spots available to pick the best batsmen available.
Had Langeveldt been fit, Kolkata could have opted to go in with an attack of Shane Bond, Charl Langeveldt, Ishant Sharma, Murali Karthik and Angelo Mathews - easily amongst the more potent attacks in the IPL today. That would have hurt their batting though as one amongst Brad Hodge or Owais Shah would have to be dropped to accommodate both Bond and Langeveldt. Whether the Knight Riders would have been bold enough to take that punt, and whether a high quality attack would have been better suited to stopping Chennai running away with the game in the last six overs of their innings when they plundered 83 runs, will remain unanswered at least for today, since Langeveldt was ruled out of the match with an injury.
With Langeveldt out, Kolkata were in a position where their four foreigners had to be Bond, Owais Shah, Brad Hodge and Angelo Mathews. So far so good, but they then needed to get their other seven players right too. Sourav Ganguly as captain of course had to be there, and the other players who had earned spots in the team by virtue of past performance were Ishant Sharma, Murali Karthik, Manoj Tiwary and Wridhiman Saha as the wicket-keeper. That left two places up for grabs. With a bowling attack that was already good (Bond, Ishant, Murali Karthik, Angelo Mathews) and with players like Brad Hodge, Sourav Ganguly and Manoj Tiwary who can all turn their arm over, the emphasis should then have been to include the best batsmen amongst the lot available.
Kolkata went for Rohan Gavaskar and Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Now both Rohan and Shukla are good, decent cricketers, but were they the best batsmen available to Kolkata?
On the bench were two people who should have been wondering why they were not on the field - Cheteshwar Pujara and Ganapathi Vignesh.
Pujara has been scoring runs by the bucket-loads in all kinds of domestic competitions and has unquestionably better batting pedigree than either Laxmi Ratan Shukla or Rohan Gavaskar. He has been spoken of as the man to replace Rahul Dravid at the Number 3 spot in Test matches - which is not a light epithet.
He averages 57.19 in first class cricket and in domestic limited overs matches, his average is 51.27 at a strike rate of 78.55. Surely enough pedigree to suggest that he should be persisted with in Twenty20s (where his domestic strike rate is 131.57 in the few matches he has played) even though he had failed in Kolkata's first two matches.
The other candidate - Ganapathi Vignesh - was more obscure. He had hardly started his first class career, when he joined the ICL, and thereby sank from the collective consciousness and memory. However, his skills did not erode. He was the highest run scorer in the ICL, and joint 10th in the wicket-taking charts for the Chennai Superstars.
He averaged 26.24 at an astounding strike rate of 151.19 with the bat and his economy rate while bowling was 7.58 - not great, but not pathetic.
As a batsman he would have definitely offered more than Rohan Gavaskar or Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Shukla probably had better bowling credentials, but then Kolkata needed to fortify their batting more than their bowling. And Vignesh wouldn't have been required to bowl a full quota of four overs in any case since Kolkata had enough batsmen who could turn their arm over.
The eventual margin of defeat for Kolkata was 55 runs, and perhaps Pujara and Vignesh wouldn't have been able to score that many between them. But by not taking them into the eleven in the first place, Kolkata cut down their chances of stringing together three consecutive victories and topping the table.
http://www.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/24822/Did-Kolkata-miss-a-trick-in-team-selection-
AuthorTopic: IPL 2010 : Match 8 : KKR vs Chennai Super Kings (Read 1027 times)
