Select The Unselected

There was this thought that came to my mind while watching the first T20 International between India and England last week. The face of the English T20 squad had changed completely, whereas India were still fielding a fair amount of players who had played in the Tests. Some numbers would give one a fair idea of how the Indian and English squads compared. The Englishmen had retained just the one player, Tim Bresnan to play in the first T20 whereas India had retained six, Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin and Piyush Chawla. This brings us to the point that has been made a million times by thousands of cricket experts all over the world since the advent of T20 cricket and the IPL thereafter. The point being there has been too much cricket and players run out of steam at one point. The length of the IPL and the ICC's Future Tours Program have been questioned in this regard which is fair to a certain extent. But, there are teams who are managing to do well despite this rigorous schedule in foreign and home conditions across different formats of the game. 

This brings us to my little research about the number of players involved in different formats for their respective nations. The research is only confined to teams who do not indulge in changing squads on a regular basis. This little statistic that shows up here has been calculated from a selected list of players from the official squads who feature regularly in their national side. 

This table gives an idea of the number of players involved in different forms of the game for Australia, England, India and South Africa. It is quite obvious that all teams have about the same number of people playing two /all three formats. The point that is worth noting is that India and England have very few players playing one format alone. This means that the set of players available are not well managed. 

If we consider the England case, from the recently concluded T20 and Test series, it looks like they are making some serious advances in this regard. 90% of their team had been changed in the interest of providing chances to the rest of the squad and also keeping their best at their best by giving them some rest. Going further Kevin Pietersen has been omitted from the squad for the Limited overs leg of the New Zealand Tour and Graeme Swann from the ODI and T20 squads for the Tours of India and New Zealand respectively. All of these have happened after the year where Pietersen had quite a lot of issues with the ECB about managing his workload. The ECB seem to have realized that there's some real value in what Pietersen has been saying all this while and look like they are going to take measures to solve the issue.

India, on the other hand have had the same set of players playing most of the matches irrespective of the format and that doesn't seem to be doing them any good apart from issues with their bowling, batting and fielding skills. A look at the other squads gives an impression that there have been a lot of changes from format to format. First of all none of the teams other than India have the same captain for all the three formats and it looks like they seem to be succeeding. So, it should be worth a try

Captains-India, South Africa, Australia, England (From Top-Left to Bottom-Left)
[India have only one]

It is also important to note that Australia, South Africa and England have produced decent enough substitutes for their premier players to play in formats that require different skills. India do not have the luxury of trying out other players from their regular tried and tested set because the rest aren't good enough substitutes. But, to get to a state where there are good enough substitutes, India need to start offering the lesser skilled substitutes a chance in limited overs cricket and reach the numbers that South Africa and Australia have maintained. 

Ultimately, cricket is just a sport and sport is nothing but another source of entertainment for the common man. The common man needs entertainment throughout the year and that is why professional sportsmen have to play throughout the year. Given the hectic schedule of international cricket, a limited set of players cannot play all games and hence all teams need to "Select The Unselected" to be able to provide sustained good quality sport at the highest level.