What will the new season hold for team India?

After 2 full years on the road, a World Cup win and two utterly disastrous tours later, BCCI’s Team India went on a much needed hiatus this summer, rudely interrupted as it was by a loud IPL after a sleepwalk through the Asia cup. Well, they now assemble again, to embark upon a new season’s skirmishes. They start with a tour of Sri Lanka, oh-so-familiar-that-even-deja-vu-would-get-repeated-bouts-of-deja-vu. It’ll be followed by an inexplicable dash home to host New Zealand for a couple of games (why?) before popping back into Sri Lanka for the World T20. Then there’s the CL T20 somewhere in the middle. The mad rush ends with what is sure to be billed and hyped as “The revenge tour part-2 & 3″ and “India’s shot at redemption”, etc. when England arrive for a full fledged bilateral series, followed closely on their heels by the other candidates for a ‘payback series’, the Australians. And before you know it, the IPL circus will be all set to hit the town once more. It promises to be an action packed winter, and if things aren’t peachy half way through, a terribly long one as well. To ensure that doesn’t come to pass, India have a few questions to answer:

The Batting: Who can fill the wall-sized shoes left vacant in the No.3 spot in tests? Dravid is a tough tough act to follow, and there’s a whole line of young batsmen knocking at the door. But who among them is destined to be India’s next batting mainstay?

The Bowling: How long will Zaheer Khan last? Will Yadav and Aaron go the Ishant way? Or will Ishant go the Zaheer way? Has time run out for Harbhajan Singh? Where’s the mystery gone from Indian spin bowling?

Will he play, will he not?

The pink elephant in the room: Will the selectors wait for Sachin to decide if he’s ‘enjoying the game’ or will they decide to build a side for the 2015 ODI title defense? It seems highly unfair to continually let an individual player pick and choose the fixtures he features in, irrespective of how great the individual is, while hordes never get a single opportunity. But then, what happens after Sachin walks away? And what when VVS ends his vigil too?

Wishful thinking: How ready is Virat Kohli to stake a claim for ‘The Job’? MSD looked positively jaded by the end of last season, and a change of guard is on the cards sooner rather than later. Sehwag and Gambhir have harbored ambitions of leading the side. Raina has also been given the task on an occasion, but in a lot of people’s (read: fans’) minds, Virat is the next long-term captain material. It is still too early, but then again, exactly how soon is too soon?

The feel-good story of the year: Can Yuvraj Singh complete his fairytale?

Just for pun: Should BCCI just dunk Duncan Fletcher? Let’s face it, he inherited a World ODI champion, World Test ranking #1 team in 2011, and the team hasn’t won anything ever since (not counting the England ‘brownwash’ in ODIs last winter). Is Fletcher the right man for the job?

All these questions have a profound bearing on the future direction of Indian cricket. The way things stand today, Indian cricket is at crossroads. The euphoria of the World cup win is now a distant memory. The media bubble and aura of invincibility is all but gone. The economic scene has undergone a lot of turmoil. The long wait for the ton of tons is a thing of the past. The holy trinity of Indian batting has been reduced to two, and even that might not last too long. The search for the mythical Indian all-rounder is still floundering. The evolution of India’s spin bowling seems to have slowed down. Ashwin and Ojha seem to be in flavor, but we still aren’t looking past these two and Harbhajan, and maybe Amit Mishra. It is probably time to blood the Iqbal Abdullas of Indian cricket.

On the other hand, for the first time, Indian pace bowling looks like it has a ‘fast and hostile’ future. The next generation of Indian batting seems poised and eager to affect the change of guard, for real. Yuvraj Singh, although just at the beginning of a long road to recovery, is a big asset to Indian cricket. His potential to inspire, motivate and bring together an Indian team, and the huge Indian cricket fan following is immense after what he has gone through. It just needs to be tapped in the right way. Most of all, lack of televised cricket featuring India and Indian players would have hopefully whetted the appetites of the billion strong diaspora, and that should hopefully get a bit of the buzz back in and the jaded feel out of all that surrounds the nation’s sport of choice.

So all in all, it promises to be an exciting season for Indian cricket in 2012-13. It starts in a week’s time, clashing with the Olympics, which is sure to throw up a few debates about cricket v/s everything else. All in good spirit, of course. After all, the scale is just incomparable. But in that one week of lead-up, let’s do what we Indians enjoy the most: talk and speculate cricket!

Cheers!