Former India batsman Virender Sehwag isn't a big fan of Team India making fitness test mandatory to get picked into the squad. He said when it comes to selection, a team should look for skills more than their Yo-Yo test outcome.
India's captain Virat Kohli has always been vocal about the importance of fitness to be in the side. But Sehwag feels if a player is fit enough to field for the entire game and bowl the required overs, he should be qualified to play.
Varun Chakravarthy and Rahul Tewatia were named in the squad for the T20I series against England, but they failed the fitness test and had to miss out. Sehwag was asked why did India rule out Chakravarthy while Hardik Pandya, who didn't bowl in the first two ODIs because of fitness concern, got to play.
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“Skill is important, today if you are playing a fit team but don’t have the skills, then you would ultimately end up losing. Play them based on their skills, slowly you can improve their fitness over time but if is yo-yo criteria is applied straight away, then the talks are different. If a player can field and bowl 10 overs, that should be enough, we shouldn’t be concerned about the other things,” Sehwag told Cricbuzz.
Sehwag further added that if there was a Yo-Yo test in his playing days, the popular faces in Indian cricket like Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman may not have played. He revealed that Ganguly and Laxman rarely used to get the desired mark of 12.5 in the fitness test.
“I want to tell you one thing, here we are talking about yo-yo Test, Hardik Pandya doesn’t have issues with running, he has issues with workload because of his bowling. However, Ashwin and (Varun) Chakravarthy, on the other hand, haven’t cleared the yo-yo Test, that’s why they aren’t here.
"But I won’t agree with all of this, if these criteria existed before, Tendulkar, Laxman, and Ganguly wouldn’t have passed it. During my time, we had such a test, where they always fell short of the 12.5 mark,” he said.
(With Cricbuzz Inputs)
