Conversations around Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma’s non-participation in domestic cricket in the wake of one of their worst batting performances in India’s humiliating whitewash in a Test series at home against New Zealand are slowly gathering pace. One of India’s former selectors, Devang Gandhi, sent a reminder of Sachin Tendulkar’s 2000 act, while his ex-colleagues in the committee urged BCCI for a scheduling overhaul.
Kohli scored just 93 runs in the recently-concluded contest against New Zealand, averaging just 15.50, his lowest in a home series in seven years and second-worst overall. Rohit, on the other hand, incurred back-to-back batting lows in the last two months. In September, in the series against Bangladesh at home, he scored just 42 runs in two matches, his second-worst show in a contest at home and worst in nine years, while 91 runs came against New Zealand at 15.16 (fourth on the list).
While veteran cricketers questioned their absence in the Duleep Trophy in the lead-up to India’s long Test calendar in September, where most India regulars and fringe options participated, Gandhi, who had been a national selector between 2017 and 2021, recalled while talking to PTI, that one of the greatest-ever batters Sachin had once played Ranji Trophy in a space of just two weeks following the end of an ODI series.
“In gruelling heat of second week of April, in the year 2000, he played Ranji Trophy semi-final for Mumbai against Tamil Nadu and scored a double hundred in a first innings chase of nearly 500. In another three days, he was playing the Ranji final against Hyderabad team which had Mohammed Azharuddin and VVS Laxman and scored a fifty and a hundred. Tendulkar played Ranji semi-final and final in a space of two weeks in April after playing ODIs till end of March,” said the former player.
In fact, the legendary batter, along with his teammates Zaheer Khan, Ajit Agarkar and Sourav Ganguly, had once travelled from Vadodara to Mumbai in a flight a day after India’s four-match ODI series at home against West Indies in late January of 2007, which was preceded by a gruelling Test tour of South Africa the same month, to participate in Mumbai-Bengal Ranji Trophy final. 48 hours after the match, Tendulkar, Ganguly, and Zaheer were on the flight to Sri Lanka for an ODI series.
“Obviously workload is important and so is rest. But for batters, if you realise that you are not in best of form, you have to take recourse to domestic cricket. I believe one Duleep Trophy game could have been played,” Gandhi reasoned.
Notably, Kohli last played a domestic match in 2013 in a Ranji Trophy match for Delhi, while Rohit’s last appearance was for Mumbai in 2015.
A need for a scheduling overhaul?
Despite Gandhi’s ‘workload management’ remark, his former colleague MSK Prasad reckoned that it was unfair to compare two different eras given the volume of cricket the present generation of cricketers play.
“It is unlike Kapil paaji and Sunny sir’s days, volume of cricket has increased exponentially. It takes a lot out of cricketers,” Prasad said. “I think, the one-off Irani Cup match is where the BCCI can make it mandatory for stars to show up for the Rest of India team but they have to slot it at a time which is not overlapping with a Test series.”
The former chief selector gave two suggestions on how BCCI can get the top cricketers to feature in domestic cricket – bring back the rotation policy “to ensure breaks for players,” and a change in scheduling.
The ‘India Cricket’ season which runs from October to March will always have Ranji Trophy overlapping with some home Test series unless the team travels to Australia, New Zealand or South Africa during the same period.
“A good way is to schedule a home Test series in such a manner that at least one or two Ranji rounds precede it instead of running parallelly, which has been the case all this while,” Prasad said.
