During the crushing 0-3 defeat in the three-match Test series against New Zealand, the performance of the great batsmen disappointed the most and questions are being raised on these big batsmen because these players have played in big domestic events like Ranji and Duleep Trophy. Almost gave up participating. The players of the present era are given the freedom to stay away from domestic events in view of workload management but such was not the situation in the past. If we talk about the year 2007, the Indian team’s long tour of South Africa ended in January.
Immediately after this, the team had to participate in the ODI series against West Indies to prepare for the ODI World Cup. India played four ODI matches on 21, 24, 27 and 31 January in Nagpur, Chennai, Cuttack and Vadodara. After this, on February 1, four experienced members of the team, Sachin Tendulkar, Zaheer Khan, Ajit Agarkar and Sourav Ganguly left for Mumbai from Vadodara because all four wanted to participate in the Ranji Trophy final to be played from February 2 to 6. In this match, Tendulkar scored a century, Ganguly scored 90 runs and Zaheer also took some important wickets.
Tendulkar, Ganguly and Zaheer had to play an ODI series against Sri Lanka within 48 hours of the Ranji final and ‘workload management’ was not a topic of discussion then. An exception may be the case of Jasprit Bumrah who is more prone to injury but he has the extraordinary skill of bowling brilliantly in any situation. Questions are being raised over players like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja being left out of the Duleep Trophy.
Former India opener Devang Gandhi told PTI, “In the scorching heat of the second week of April in the year 2000, Tendulkar played the Ranji Trophy semi-final for Mumbai against Tamil Nadu and was chasing almost 500 runs in the first innings. Scored a double century.”
This former wicketkeeper batsman, who was the national selector between 2017 and 2021, said, “Three days after this match, he was playing the Ranji final against the Hyderabad team. There were players like Mohammad Azharuddin and VVS Laxman in the Hyderabad team. Tendulkar Tendulkar scored a half-century and a century in this match and played the Ranji semi-finals and final in a span of two weeks in April.
On the other hand, Kohli played his last Ranji Trophy match in 2013 against Uttar Pradesh in Ghaziabad. Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Ashish Nehra, Ishant Sharma, Suresh Raina, Mohammad Kaif and Bhuvneshwar Kumar were also involved in this match. This was probably the last Ranji Trophy match in which so many players of the national team were playing together.
Rohit played his last match for Mumbai in Ranji Trophy in 2015. After that both of them played one first-class match each. Kohli has played one match for India A before the Sri Lanka tour (2017) and Rohit has played one match for India A before the home series against South Africa (2019). After this match, Rohit started opening the innings in Tests.
Sachin Tendulkar played 310 first-class matches in his career including 200 Tests. The Master Blaster has played 110 first-class matches, including practice matches, in 24 years despite a busy international schedule. In comparison, Kohli has played 32 first-class matches and Rohit has performed slightly better with 61 matches in 18 years of first-class cricket since 2006.
Sachin Tendulkar’s last Ranji Trophy match was in 2013 (against Haryana at Lahli in October). However, Rohit and Kohli have to go through the busy IPL schedule for two months. Rohit has played 448 T20 matches in his career while Kohli has played 399 matches.
Gandhi said, “Obviously workload management and rest are both important.” He said, “However, when the batsmen know that they are not in their best form, they should have returned to domestic cricket. I believe that these players should have played Duleep Trophy matches.”
However, the views of former selection committee chairman MSK Prasad are quite different from Gandhi. He believes that considering the amount of cricket being played in the present era, it is unfair to compare two different eras.
Prasad said, “This is unlike the days of Kapil paaji (Dev) and Sunny sir (Sunil Gavaskar), the amount of cricket has increased rapidly. Here players have to give a lot.” He said, “I think BCCI can ask the rest of the Indian team to play big players by arranging the Irani Cup matches at the right time.”
Prasad also felt that there should be a ‘rotation (resting players between matches)’ policy to manage the workload, which was implemented by the committee led by him between 2017 and 2021. “I don’t know why the ‘rotation’ system we introduced to ensure breaks for the players has been scrapped, you didn’t need all-stars to play against Bangladesh,” he said.