Ganguly, why are you not playing in Ranji Trophy?

By John Cheeran
Sourav Ganguly desperately wants to play for India.
National selectors say Team India has no place for him.
So what do you do? If it had been any other cricketer, who has been dropped from the Indian team and yet wants to make a comeback, the obvious choice would be to play at the next available opportunity to tell the selectors they have made an error in leaving out you.
How do you do that?
You go back to the Ranji Trophy contests.
Play for your state side and hammer the bowling and post a huge score, as huge as you can get it. And hope that some of the established batsmen in the Team India fail so that you can stake your claims for a slot in the side.
Well, that’s the way cricketers, just not in India but world over, win back their place.
That, however, involves hard work.
And hard work and Ganguly do not go hand in hand.
Ganguly, of course, wants to be with Team India but he is not keen to work hard for it. Otherwise, he should have been playing for Bengal in their crucial Ranji Trophy game against Karnataka which began on Saturday in Mysore.
Skipper Rahul Dravid’s backyard would have been the ideal stage for Ganguly to prove his detractors wrong.
Not for the Maharaj. Why should he do the Ranji Trophy grind when Jagmohan Dalmiya writes letters to BCCI President and Union Minister Sharad Pawar to ensure the Bengal quota in the Indian team.
Why should Ganguly sweat it out when Parliament wants to admonish selectors in leaving him out?
Has he not performed enough poojas, and his supporters burnt enough number of effigies of Greg Chappell and Kiran More?
Or as is the tradition in Indian cricket, has he booked the ticket to Pakistan through his agent Dalmiya?
I would be the last person to be surprised, if that, indeed, is the case.