Manoj Tiwary recently came into news headlines for his tweets in which he had asked a famous cricket statistician for some stats regarding his performances in domestic cricket. This had come after he was snubbed from the two separate squads for the quadrangular series against Australia A and South Africa A announced by the selectors.
His name was surprisingly missing from the squads for the Duleep Trophy as well.
A veteran of Ranji Trophy and other domestic tournaments, Tiwary averaged over 100 in the two List A tournaments in the previous season. In Vijay Hazare Trophy, he compiled 328 runs at an average of 109.33. In Deodhar Trophy in March, Tiwary scored 179 runs in two innings at an average of 179.00, including a century against Karnataka.
His act of digging up stats was seen aimed at national selectors, something that he has denied in an interview to timesnownews.com. Here are the excerpts.
Manoj Tiwary said, “First of all, let me clarify that I haven’t tweeted anything regarding the team selection. I just asked the statistician regarding a stat which I was curious to know. That’s it. But it’s true that I haven’t heard anything from the selectors.”
Talking about IPL 2018, Tiwary said,” I didn’t get many opportunities to play in this season of IPL whereas I had an outstanding season last year, where our team reached finals.”
Tiwary replied in affirmative when asked if he was hoping for selection in the squad for India A or Indian national team for the England tour.
“Yes, I was surprised but I knew I had a great season. An average of 100 plus in both Deodhar and Vijay Hazare Trophy is very rare to have”, Tiwary said after getting the numbers about his performance.
He said that his next assignment will be for Bengal and he aims to better his performance of previous seasons.
Tiwary also spoke about his low arm off-spin bowling action and said, “Yes. The reason behind the switch is not to give the batsmen any bounce to hit. It is very useful on slow and flat tracks considering the main bowlers go for high economy rates these days in IPL and shorter formats. At least with this action, I will not go for many runs.”
He ended the interview with the comment, ”Roadmap is to score runs, runs, and more runs.”
