India’s first world cup winning captain Kapil Dev expressed his thoughts on prioritising playing in-form players over star players.
Kapil Dev feels that the ex-skipper Virat Kohli’s form is a cause of concern for everybody as he hasn’t performing well in all formats over the past couple of years.
In his absence, the likes of Deepak Hooda, have performed exceedingly well in the shortest format, playing an explosive brand of cricket.
What Deepak Hooda did in Kohli’s absence?
Hooda, who was called up to play for India for Ireland series, impressed everyone with his brilliant batting skills while batting up the order. He ended the two-match series as the highest run-scorer with 151 runs in 2 games at a strike rate of 175.58, including a century.
In the first T-20 game against England, Hooda once again played a good knock of quick fire 33 to provide strength to the Indian batting. However, even after performing so well he was unable to retain his spot as Kohli, who was on rest for 1st T20, returning to the side, but Kohli was failed to leave any mark again and got dismissed for 1.
On Kohli’s current place in the Indian T20I squad, Kapil Dev told ABP News, “Play in-form players when you have loads of options. You can’t just go by reputation, but you have to look for current form. You can be an established player but that doesn’t mean that you will be given chances even if you fail five games in a row.”
Dev also stated that if a bowler with Ravichandran Ashwin’s calibre could be dropped from the Test team, so could Virat Kohli. Over the course of the five-game Test series against England, Ashwin did not appear in a single game.
“If world No. 2 Test bowler Ashwin can be dropped from Test side then your No. 1 batter can also be dropped,” Kapil stated.
“If he isn’t performing, you can’t continue to keep these boys out. I hope there’s a healthy fight for selection, the youngsters should look to outperform Kohli. But Kohli needs to think, ‘yes at one point I was a big player, but I need to play like that No. 1 player again’. That’s a problem for the team, it’s not a bad problem,” he concluded.
