Dynamic is the word for Virat Kohli's Team India
In just his second delivery, Ishant Sharma forces Aiden Markram to poke around outside off. Brought in to lend an experienced hand to the Indian pace quartet, Sharma will be looking to ape the opposition’s strategy and employ some chin music to bounce out the South African batsmen. Meanwhile, Bhuvneshwar Kumar looks on from the sidelines, leaving the Indian fan in a fix as to what could have possibly led to Kumar’s omission, for he returned with figures of 4-87 in the first innings of the first Test and ensured that the South African batsmen were found wanting for answers against his lethal swing.
It would serve us well to stop racking our brains for there aren’t many reasons which could explain his omission other than the fact that in Kohli’s mind, Ishant's skill set is better suited to the pitch in Centurion. The Indian team, on the whole, is`simply suffering from the problem of plenty.
The Winning Combination
While the individual puts on a show, the result of the match bears the potential to nullify the same. Other factors such as a change in the venue and the varying skill sets of players on the team's roster come into the picture. The result? A change in the team composition, for there is no singular winning combination. There can never be because just like the venues, the opposition and the formats, the team itself needs to be dynamic and yet, in harmony with the shuffling. Evidently, the players have gotten used to this new order of things for when quizzed about how he deals with the shuffling of openers in Tests, Murali Vijay has often talked about an absence of enmity between the players and an understanding of what’s best for the team.
In many ways, this is an ideal scenario for a team which, for the longest time, assigned more weightage to the credibility of individuals earned over time in long drawn careers. Thus, the team’s composition which needed to be reviewed for a different pitch was kept on the back burner.
An absence of favouritism
Kumar’s omission could in fact backfire and Kohli would be answerable, but favouritism wouldn’t feature in that discourse as it did so often during the years of the ‘Fab 4’ – Tendulkar, Laxman, Dravid and Sehwag, when non-performance was very often masked by towering cults, and the status quo prevailed until mounting media scrutiny forced the team management to bring in some conciliatory changes.
The reason: alongside Kumar, it is Kohli’s Delhi playmate Shikhar Dhawan who’s also enjoying the play from the sidelines while KL Rahul fills his spot on the field. Further, we had two specialist wicketkeepers boarding the team bus. While Saha played the first Test, Parthiv Patel has walked out to the field in Centurion and while Ashwin takes to the field for the Tests, he will in all probability, make way for the young spin guns, Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal in the ODIs. The reason being Kohli’s ever renewed search for a winning combination which is subject to a constant review with a change in the venue.
Thus, the problem of plenty is being tackled head on but this time, it is the team's cause which assumes precedence.