Supreme court appointed Committee of Administrators(COA) chief, Vinod Rai has come out and expressed that it is the Indian team management, led by the captain Virat Kohli and head coach Ravi Shastri, which will decide whether the results of all player's Yo-Yo test will be made public over the BCCI website or not.
The Yo-Yo test has run into controversy after Ambati Rayudu was dropped from the ODI side after being selected for the England tour, owing purely to his failure to attain the passing number in his test at the National Cricket Academy(NCA) recently. Prompting suggestions from all corners about the right timing to conduct the test and also, whether the BCCI should actually publish the results of all player's Yo-Yo test over its website.
Vinod Rai was recently quoted saying to CricketNext as, “See, that is for the team management to decide if they wish to release the results of the test conducted on the players, It is not my domain and I don’t wish to get into that.”
The Committee of Administrators took note of a letter from treasurer Anirudh Chaudhry and on Wednesday had a presentation from General Manager Cricket Operations Saba Karim on how the test functions and its effectiveness in assessing the fitness of cricketers. Chaudhry had written to the CoA asking them on the turn of events that led to the Yo-Yo test becoming a compulsion in team selection.
Chaudhary in his mail, questioned, “At which forum was the decision taken to have a minimum score on the Yo-yo test as a prerequisite for selection into a BCCI selected team? Who all were present in the meeting that decided this? Have minutes been recorded of the said meeting? If the player has had an increased workload in the past few weeks and is somewhat fatigued, would he not be scoring less on the recovery tests?”
Happy with the presentation that Saba Karim made, Rai had replied, “It wasn’t really a presentation. It was an internal discussion and not something I wish to talk about.”
Before departing to England, Ravi Shastri made it absolutely clear that, “The philosophy regarding the yo-yo test is very simple. You pass you play, you fail you sail. Whosoever thinks that it is a one-off thing can take a walk. It is not going to go anywhere. The captain leads from the front, the selectors and the entire team management are on the same page.”
Which, Virat Kohli sitting next to him reiterated, by stating, “People might not be able to see a small thing that happens when you play a particular Test match but I think that makes a massive difference, We are a team that wants to travel well. Jasprit Bumrah was bowling 144 kmph in his last spell during the final Test. That's when one's fitness comes in. When you have people who are fit, hungry and ready, then you are not only competing but also winning matches"
"Either you get emotional and let go (chuck) a policy or take hard calls and move ahead with the system. All those things have come together nicely and we are looking forward towards playing some real hard cricket. We are looking forward towards playing difficult cricket as that's the only way we will be able to test our self as a team."
(Inputs from CricketNext)
