Letter of the Day

Coming to the view I think is very important today, whether Sachin Tendulkar should come in the middle order in the one-day games. I am saying this keeping in mind the World Cup in South Africa.

To help understand the beef behind this thinking, we see that the Indian middle order in one day games is very inexperienced, and mainly boasts of youngsters like Badani, Sehwag, Sodhi and Yuvraj. While they have shown the courage and will to succeed at the international level, they need to have someone there to assist them in crunch situations, and who else is better than Sachin in this world to be a big brother to the exuberant young players?

We have seen Sachin guiding and encouraging players like Rahul and Saurav, and how wonderfully they have responded back by learning the trade and tricks of the game.

Another fact that we need to consider is that though everyone agrees that Sachin is the best player in the world, one gets skeptical about the role and responsibilty he has been provided with in the current Indian team.When we have such classy players like Saurav and Rahul, and also with Laxman showing that he can be a really potent player,the job of the best player in the world is to see India through, that is bat in the crunch moments.

This responsibilty would perhaps be the ideal challenge for him to play some memorable innings for the nation. We all know that he has the potential to do this, and he has played many great innngs in the past and helped India win matches single handedly, but now that we are no more a one man team of Sachin, we need to give him the specialist job,perhaps similar to that of Aravinda Desilva in the 96 world Cup.

The conditions there in South Africa would obviously favour seam bowling,so it is a great risk to expose our ace player early, however good he may be, instead we should have someone like Shiv Sunder Das to open the batting with the Skipper, this would provide the ideal solidity in the opening position and with the flamboyance and mastery of Saurav and Laxman, and the class of Rahul, and most importantly the acumen, and cricketing genius of Sachin, we can chase any total, post a threatening total anywhere in the world,and really can whack any attack in the world.

Vishwas Saxena