Ganguly’s challenge: Get fit for ODIs

More importantly, the national selectors meet on October 13 to pick the team for the first two ODIs against Sri Lanka; Ganguly wouldn’t have started playing by then so it would be interesting to see what decision is taken regarding his place in the team.

Though he made a typically optimistic statement in Kolkata — ‘‘I hope to be fit to play against Sri Lanka’’, he said on his return from Mumbai — he knows the matter really isn’t in his hands. His fate rests with the doctors and, in the strange world of the BCCI, with the suits who pull the strings.

‘‘Ganguly’s injury is a mild form of tennis elbow,’’ Gloster said. It is the same injury that kept Sachin Tendulkar out of cricket for almost a year but Gloster was reassuring. ‘‘The tennis elbow has been detected at a very early stage’’, he said, adding that the consequences would not be as serious as in Sachin’s case.

Gloster and Dr Joshi also felt that dealing with Tendulkar’s elbow had left them better equipped to handle Ganguly’s injury.

The physio chronicled the saga of Sourav’s elbow. The trouble, he said, had started at the beginning of India’s tour of Zimbabwe. The pain was mild at the early stages till he was hit on the spot during the warm-up match in Mutare. That’s the incident referred to by Greg Chappell in his e-mail to the BCCI, which prompted Ganguly to walk out retired hurt.

After returning to India, Ganguly consulted leading Kolkata orthopaedic surgeon Kalyan Mukherjee and got an MRI scan done. Gloster and Dr Joshi have based their report on Ganguly’s elbow, taking Dr Mukherjee’s analysis into account.

In another interesting development, Ganguly was named skipper of the East Zone side for the four-day Duleep Trophy match against North Zone, beginning on October 20 in Rajkot. This could be a safety clause, in case Joshi and Gloster decree that he needs a match to prove his fitness.

This bit of news alone had the rumour mills and spin doctors busy, with people arguing whether the BCCI rulebook — as if it is followed by anyone — states that he needs to play a trial match.

For now, though, Ganguly can only sweat it out. And all the stability you thought had been restored to Team India is now on hold again.