As India gear up for their opening match against unknown Hong Kong in the Asia Cup, “rotation policy” seems to be the catch-phrase in the camp. Captain MS Dhoni is of the view that the life-span of an international cricketer is bound to get shorter with the amount of cricket played these days “It’s quite obvious that you won’t find cricketers playing for 18 and 20 years like you used to in the past,” he says.Coach Gary Kirsten agrees. He is a firm believer that, since the bowlers bear the toll of excessive cricket more than anyone else, their careers will start getting shorter sooner. “We have to be careful with bowlers. We just can’t expect them to play throughout the year,” he says.So, the captain and coach are now busy working on formalising the policy of rotation in the Indian team. They believe it’s not worth risking your most important players, particularly bowlers, in matches that are inconsequential to the tournament. The buzz is that one of the prominent features in India’s international fixtures is going to be: any player struggling even with a minor niggle will have to sit out on that particular day.Dhoni and Kirsten have worked with the team’s bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad to put a plan in place. The former India bowler Prasad, who’s found substantial success in his one-year-old role, says: “Teams must have a plan if they have to play top-quality cricket and survive with fit players in this hectic international calendar.”In the last year — since India toured England in 2007 — Zaheer Khan, RP Singh and S Sreesanth have ended up missing as many matches as they have played. In fact, Zaheer has hardly played any cricket this year other than during the IPL. RP Singh has played only one one-dayer this season, and Sreesanth, who missed the Test series against Australia earlier, informed the BCCI at the last moment about his unavailability for the Bangladesh tri-series and the ongoing Asia Cup.Kirsten doesn’t mince words when he says that such eleventh-hour revelations almost always disrupt the team’s plans. “There is always a plan in place. A lot of thinking goes into every match or ahead of a series,” he says.Ishant Sharma is a classic example of what Kirsten, Prasad and Dhoni are worried about. After a heavy workload in Australia, he carried an injury into the IPL and now, immediately after recovery, the bowler is once again part of a minor tournament such as the Asia Cup. “The ideal situation would be when a player is ready to come forward and say he needs to opt for rest,” says Kirsten. “It is unfair to ask a player to sit out without any particular reason and the player is also worried that if his replacement does well, then he could lose his place. So, here is where the rotation policy comes in — we replace a bowler and the replacement does well, but the bowler who was rested is still convinced that he is the number one.”Such plans have been formulated several times in Indian cricket but haven’t been implemented successfully. Now, Dhoni and Kirsten are hoping they can do better than some of their predecessors.
