Kiran More
We Were Right to Drop Ganguly, Zaheer
By Kiran More
Dec 14, 2006, 17:54

Make no mistake, this three-match Test series between India and South Africa is going to depend on the performances of Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble. Those two are very key men to India in the whole series.

Rahul is coming back from a broken finger but how many runs he scores will determine what kind of totals India is able to put on the board. There has been a lot of pressure on him and that continues to be the case.

We saw in the West Indies a few months ago, when India won the final Test to take the series, it was Rahul who scored the majority of the runs and Anil who took the wickets and I don’t see this series being any different.

Rahul spends a lot of time on the wicket and he carries the team. All the batsmen are accountable but it is still Rahul churning out the big runs. Equally, Anil may be in his mid-thirties but he’s still the key bowler. He has taken almost 50 wickets in his last ten Tests. Those are major contributions.

The first day of the series is going to be very crucial and India need to win the toss and bowl. If South Africa’s bowlers have first use of a wicket at Johannesburg that does a bit they will have the upper hand. The last couple of matches on the ground against New Zealand and Australia have been low-scoring affairs.

I think India’s best chance of winning in the series is going to be batting second, when the wicket is not doing as much and when we have had the chance to restrict their batting line up. Makhaya Ntini has had a great last 12 months and he will want to get stuck into the Indian batting at the earliest opportunity. But if India can score 350 plus in the first innings of each Test they will have a very good chance as I don’t think the South Africa batting is all that strong.  

The Indian team’s confidence will be quite low after losing the one-day series heavily, especially the batsmen, but they lost quite a few tosses in the one-dayers, while Rahul was injured.

They should remember though the character they have shown in bouncing back over the last year. They lost the one-day series in the West Indies 4-1 but still came back to win the Test series and should have won by a bigger margin that 1-0. They also lost a close Test series in Pakistan at the start of the year and came back to win the one-day series comfortably, so they have come back strong from defeats. I just worry that the batting confidence is not there.

One man who will be confident after a positive start is Sourav Ganguly. It’s great that he’s made a comeback and has started well on the tour but the Test series will be the ultimate challenge for him.

I don’t regret the decisions we made in selection to drop Sourav as we felt at the time that the average age of the team was too high, the fielding wasn’t good enough and we needed to better the bench strength of the team before the World Cup and beyond that. It would have been unfair to have just thrown young players into a World Cup without giving them any experience. I feel that while Sourav has been out of the team, India’s strength in depth has increased. We now have a squad of between 20 and 25 players who we can call like Suresh Raina and Venogopal Rao. Every cricketer has to make a comeback at some point in his career so good luck to him.

One man that has proved me wrong is Zaheer Khan. He bowled well in the one-day series though again he also needs to impress in the Test series to cement his place. The wickets in the one-day series favoured the opening bowlers and I would still have liked to see him take more wickets as he had the opportunities with the new ball but he has bettered himself, there’s no doubt.

Before we dropped him, we gave him many chances on the Pakistan tour but we were not happy with his fitness, his fielding was poor and we felt he had lost some pace. But he went into county cricket for a season in England and has improved his fitness, he is now showing great variety in his pace and looks a much better cricketer.

Still, the time he spent away has been good for Indian cricket in the same way as with Ganguly, as we were able to groom some talented youngsters like RP Singh, VRV Singh, Sreesanth and Munaf Patel.

The one player who is now in a position where he needs to go away and improve is Mohammad Kaif. He has not made the most of his opportunities and it’s a shame because I wished he would become for us like Mohammed Yousuf is to Pakistan and like Mahela Jayawardene is to Sri Lanka. But he has not lived up to expectations as Yuvraj Singh did, and he will need time to refocus and come back a stronger and better player. 

Kiran More played 49 Tests and 95 ODI’s for India and was Chairman of Selectors from 2002 to 2006.