A day after Rahul Dravid was shown the door from the one-day team, Sourav Ganguly appears to have got the message loud and clear—that he won’t be too far from the boot either if he doesn’t shape up on the fitness front. Ganguly’s decision to get down to training, following yesterday’s landmark selectorial move, will be closely followed by the BCCI and the selectors, who have made “fitness and fielding” their top criterion these days when it comes debating on carrying on with old warhorses. For the first time this season, Ganguly got down to some serious training, arduously going through the paces at the Eden Gardens, reverting to the rigorous training regimen to which he had confined himself last year in the run-up to his famous comeback for the South Africa tour. The man in the centre of the storm himself chose to keep away from the media in his characteristic style, but his trainer Chinmoy Roy gave a detailed lowdown of the training drills that Ganguly went through today. “He first undertook 100m sprints across the ground, 10 rounds of sprints, one after another. That was followed by what is called as per the Indian team’s training regimen, the ladder drill, where a ladder was laid out and Sourav ran over between the wrungs. The idea is to develop lighter feet and get faster. “Finally, he signed off with some abdominal strength exercises and what we call in our jargon core-stability exercises. Most of these drills are recommended by Indian team trainer Gregory King,” Roy told The Indian Express. The writing is on the wall for Ganguly — if the left-hander fails to deliver in the Guwahati and Mohali one-dayers, then it could be curtains for him for the remaining three ODIs against Pakistan. In fact, sources close to the Dilip Vengsarkar-led selection committee are hinting that it was solely on the insistence of the chief selector that Ganguly escaped the axe, eventually leading to Dravid getting dropped. And Ganguly is leaving no stone unturned to escape joining Dravid on the sidelines.
