What do young talents like Shreyas Iyer, Mayank Agarwal need to do get selected for the Indian team?
India's middle order woes are not only a problem in Test cricket, it has been a pain in one day cricket as well. The Indian team, which was once known for its strong middle order, is now struggling to form a stable middle order. A country which possesses so much cricketing talent is struggling to find 2 or 3 good players to solve this prolonged middle order crisis.
What is causing this? If we have the requisite talent then why can't we bring it to the fore?
The root cause of this problem lies in the rigid selection process. If we look at the selection of the Indian cricket team during last few years we will observe that Indian team management and selectors are playing safe. They are not willing to give opportunities to youngsters, it also implies that they are going back and forth to the same players. Players like Ambati Rayudu and Dinesh Karthik are a perfect example of this. These players have been tested many times in the past, but, they have never been able to cement their place in the national side. A reason why this keeps happening is IPL since these players play IPL regularly and perform consistently every season, they keep themselves in the limelight which brings them in the reckoning for the selection of Indian side.
It has become a vicious circle of sorts. players like Karthik and Rayudu go out of the team, perform in the IPL and on the basis of that performance come back in the team and then go out again. Talking about test cricket, Shikhar Dhawan is a perfect example of this kind of process.
This has a two-fold effect, on one hand, it prevents new talent from coming to the fore and show the world what they can do on the big stage. Unless and until they get opportunities they can't prove their mettle. On the other hand, the team keeps underperforming by committing the same mistakes, which has been the case with Indian test side, lately.
Another example of the same approach in limited overs cricket is MS Dhoni, in spite of Dhoni not performing as well as he used to do, selectors are reluctant to hand over the reins of the wicketkeeping batsman in the team to Rishabh Pant. The fifth test in England showed, what an enterprising selection can do. Pant became the first wicketkeeper for India to score a test hundred in England that too with some ease.
Shreyas Iyer, Mayank Agarwal, and Prithvi Shaw are also bearing the brunt of this kind of selection approach.
Indian selectors need to get brave with their team selection otherwise we will never be able to discover talents like Tendulkar and Harbhajan, who were brave selections during their time and turned out to be master-strokes.