Seniors rested for New Zealand One Day Series

 

BCCI in consultation with Indian cricket coach Gary Kirsten has decided to rest the senior Indian players like Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, Virender Sehwag for the upcoming one day series against New Zealand. Players have a daunting schedule ahead of them with a home series against New Zealand and a 45-day tour to South Africa before the much awaited Cricket World Cup in early February 2011. Coach Gary Kirsten expressed his concerns to the BCCI top officials on player burn-out due to the packed schedule. BCCI was very adamant on  having a short tour against New Zealand primarily due to sponsor pressures.

Kirsten had relented to BCCI pressure on having the matches against New Zealand on one condition and that is player rotation policy ahead of the World Cup in the Indian sub-continent. Kirsten had also felt that it would be  better to have some test playing players to be sent to South Africa to get acclimatized to the conditions in South Africa. After all, the present bunch of top test cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Virendar Sehwag and Zaheer Khan had not tasted success in South Africa in the longer format of the game though they had won a test match in Johannesburg in their last tour under Dravid's captaincy.

It would be good idea to test some of the young players like Sourabh Tiwary, Shikar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, Dinesh Karthick, Vinay Kumar, R.Ashwin and Abhimanyu Mithun. Yuvraj Singh who is in awfully out of form should be playing all the games ahead to get into some respectable form.