Team Selection: A Jigsaw Puzzle

The best selections are sometimes complete surprises, based on intuition, hunch and those intangibles that make us human.

- Suresh Menon

The philosophy of team selection in cricket is interesting. It varies according to the colour of the ball. Balance is the key in Test cricket, where contingencies that arise over a five ­day period have to be taken into account. In the shorter white­ ball formats, a player’s disruptive ability is important. To rephrase the poet, one hour of crowded glory is worth a game without a name.

A 20­ball fifty, a runout against the run of play, or two wickets in an over can turn a match on its head — and players who are capable of such performances consistently are worth their weight in gold. There are only a few players in the world who would qualify as disruptors — those capable of stamping a short period of the game with their own signature— but those who hint at this gift must be encouraged by selectors regardless of their long­term record or re­ cord in the run­up to the World Cup.

The selector’s brief for a World Cup, is simple: choose the squad that can win the tournament. That sounds obvious, but often squads are chosen for other reasons even if some of them are statistically sound ones. There is too the tyranny of proximity, where the last­minute performance sometimes outweighs earlier consistency.

If bowling and batting figures were all that mattered, we wouldn’t need a selection committee at all. Feed everything into a computer and watch it do the job. Just as players change their game depending on the format, selectors too must do the same. In fact, as the recent Twenty20 series against Australia showed, even within the white­ ball formats there are subtleties of selection that need to be acknowledged. T20 is more forgiving of failed attempts.