World Cup Team: A conservative choice

By John Cheeran
India’s 15 for the World Cup is a very, very conservative choice.
Well, World Cup is not a stage where you change and chop for the heck of it, but Dilip Vengsarkar, chairman of national selectors, should have taken at least form into consideration while including Virender Sehwag in the team.
What has Sehwag done to deserve a place in the side after he was dropped from the side in the post-South African safari? It is also important to remember that Sehwag had a wretched time in South Africa.
And it shows what a strange place Indian cricket is when none even whispered VVS Laxman’s name during the press conference held to announce the team for World Cup in Mumbai.
It is a pity that an injured and unproven Yuvraj Singh finds favour with selectors; a listless Sehwag finds supporters among the selectors. And Laxman, who has done well in the recently concluded South African series, was not given even a trial game in the games against the West Indies and Sri Lanka.
May be it all go to show that paucity of the talent, as Vengsarkar had put it in the past, forced selectors go for the kind of choices they made.
And remember this. It was after India lost their World Cup campaign in 1996 at home, that Indian cricket found two of its most celebrated cricketers. Those two guys were Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly. May be India will stumble on its heroes once the dust of the battle settles in the West Indies.
Indian squad Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Virender Sehwag, MS Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Dinesh Karthick, Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Ajit Agarkar, Munaf Patel, Sreesanth and Irfan Pathan.