Former India cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar has raised a question on the selection of India's playing eleven for the recently concluded ICC World Test Championship (WTC) final. India had picked up two spinners in the team for the rain-affected match at Southampton.
The Virat Kohli-led side had announced the playing eleven a day before the WTC final and Manjrekar believes the team should have made changes seeing the overcast conditions. He also pointed out the selection of Ravindra Jadeja for the WTC final and said his inclusion for batting wasn't justified.
“If you have to look at how India went about before the game started, picking two spinners was always a debatable selection especially when the conditions were overcast and the toss was delayed by a day," Manjrekar said on ESPNcricinfo. “They picked one player for his batting, which was Jadeja, and his left-arm spin wasn’t the reason he was picked. He was picked for his batting and that is something that I am always against."
India lost the match by 8 wickets as New Zealand chased down the target of 139 on the reserve day. India scored 217 runs in the first innings, and 170 runs in the second innings. New Zealand had taken a lead of 32 runs in the first innings.
Jadeja, the spin-bowling all-rounder, was picked over Hanuma Vihari in the side and Manjrekar feels it was not a good move to ignore a specialist batsman. “You have got to pick specialist players in the team and if they felt that the pitch was dry and turning, they would have picked Jadeja for his left-arm spin, along with Ashwin, that would have made sense. But they picked him for his batting and I think that backfired as mostly it does," Manjrekar opined.
“Had they had a specialist batsman in Hanuma Vihari for example, who had a pretty good defense, that would have been handy. Maybe 170 could have been 220, 225, or 230, who knows?", he added.
Manjrekar also warned India to not do the same mistake as England did in the past; picking a player for their additional strength instead of a specialist player. “But I hope India don’t do what England have historically done, pick somebody because there is another strength that they have and that strength might just come to good use, but very rarely it does when it’s a pressure game," he said.
(With ESPNcricinfo Inputs)
