The glass is half full but it should have been topped up

So what happens after 12 one-day internationals? If India do well and win both series, will we ask Dravid to continue without a gracious ‘thank you’ to Ganguly? And what if India play disappointingly against two good teams? Does Ganguly become captain for the Test matches again?

These are serious matters but I sometimes get the feeling that we close our eyes and hope a solution presents itself. That rarely happens.

Good teams, good players take hard decisions. They plan ahead; in this case one and a half years ahead, not for two months. I don’t remember hearing any announcement that Nandan Nilekani will be managing director of Infosys for three months and if he doesn’t do well enough, Narayana Murthy will return.

Sadly Ganguly’s injury couldn’t have been worse timed. The Challenger was a wonderful opportunity, on good batting wickets, to get back into form; to challenge youngsters and show them how much they need to do before they can oust the stars. But now he is faced with a question mark. The current idea in Indian cricket seems to be to play with five batsmen, a wicket keeper, an all-rounder and four bowlers. Now, five batsmen present themselves; Sehwag, Tendulkar, Dravid, Kaif and Yuvraj; Venugopal Rao and Raina wait in the wings, the likes of Uthappa show what potential there is and VVS Laxman continues to play with great composure. So, assuming that Ganguly is fit three games into the series against Sri Lanka whose place does he take? Is there a plan or are we hoping that a solution presents itself?

So too with the bowlers. Sreesanth has looked good, Piyush Chawla has been impressive and VRV Singh looks like he has a lot of potential. But for them to get a look-in someone has to sit out. Zaheer Khan has had a good match, Agarkar has batted well and bowled decently, Pathan is in good form and Harbhajan seems to enjoy bowling again.

That brings us back to the set of people with whom India have appropriated their number seven ranking. If we want to become number two or three we cannot do what we have been doing and that means either the same players perform much better or we get different players. But we aren’t even sure about the captain!

And nobody is taking a hard decision about television rights as well. Most people in the board are businessmen and I would be interested in knowing if they would start looking for vendors ten days before their product is to be launched.

Meanwhile, IS Bindra, an interesting man with interesting thoughts, says that, in the absence of a decision, he will team up with the six other associations staging one-day games against Sri Lanka and award their own rights because they are losing too much money.

I hope that is an ultimatum, an attempt to precipitate a solution (and not a deeper plan!) for otherwise the players could well turn around and say that if the board makes a loss, or a smaller profit, they lose too. Can they then say that they will award their own rights since it is their talent that brings in the money in the first place?

When small decisions are glossed over, for whatever reason, they become major problems. And Indian cricket has major problems. In my first job, if I had taken 14 months to shortlist names for an ad film, I would have been sacked. Indeed, things would not have been allowed to go that far. In Indian cricket they have but I see the same faces around!

I think Indian cricket needs desperately to go back to respectable partners. Rahul Dravid is a good beginning.