Expert Blog

Instinct or numbers?

What sets the criteria for a player’s selection to the national squad? Can instinct overpower hard numbers? Harsha Bhogle throws some light at some recent selections in the Indian team.

You can either pick a player on a hunch or on solid numbers. It’s an old argument with a few things to be said in favour of either side. Sometimes you see things in a player that suggest good numbers are round the corner; or maybe even inevitable. At other times you evaluate the hunch by going to the numbers and letting a player go because he hasn’t delivered.

I thought of that as I pondered over why the last spot in the Indian team for Nagpur had gone to Rohit Sharma and not to either Virat Kohli or Cheteshwar Pujara or even Manish Pandey. Rohit hasn’t exactly set the Ranji Trophy on fire; lots of others had been more prolific and more consistent. His recent form in one-day internationals or T20 had been ordinary and yet he has impressed almost everybody who has seen him bat.

So here is a case where a captain goes by a hunch, someone who he believes has ability that hard numbers don’t justify. By a cruel quirk of fate, Rohit was laid low by that modern enemy of cricketers, the pre-match football game. I have yet to crack the secret behind its use.

Rohit was replaced in the team by Wriddhiman Saha, a free stroking wicketkeeper from Kolkata who hadn’t quite delivered for Bengal as a batsman in what was a difficult season for them. The reason he was in the squad was that the selectors wanted to look at someone other than Parthiv Patel or Dinesh Karthik. It’s a fair reason but it meant India ended up playing a batsman who wouldn’t have been in the top ten on their wish list. Opportunity knocks in strange ways sometimes!

If Rohit was selected in spite of his numbers, Badrinath was the opposite case; someone who always had excellent stats against his name but never got the opportunity since there was no slot available. So to be fair the selectors have given him the opportunity the moment a position got created. As it turned out, it wasn’t one but three that got created!

But in every problem there is opportunity. This is our first look at how the middle order will look in the near future. Meanwhile the search for bowlers continues, with promise withering and no significant numbers anywhere on the horizon!!