The Invasion of the Younger Cricketers
Cricket is essentially a powerful sport. It requires an efficient amount strength, stamina, agility and speed to make it as one of the members of the Indian cricket team and a combined quotient of all these to make it to the acme of the cricket pyramid. While the rules and standards of the game have remained constant throughout the timeline of the game, the players are ever changing. Seasons come and go; so do the champions of the game. The once proclaimed stalwarts dwindle in form and soon enough has to make way to aspiring fledglings; because the big picture was and is always the success of the team as a whole.
Incorporating these principles, India recently made some necessary alterations to the team constitution. With the retirement of stellar players such as Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Saurav Ganguly etc, the team was already in a hapless state of confusion. So it became necessary to weed out the weak and inefficient players to make way for more young blood. Younger being synonymous with enthusiastic and energetic, players in their early twenties were lured in and some even promoted to consequential positions such as Vice-Captain.
Some players such as Virat Kohli, Suresh Raina and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who have been fast tracking their way to the top, by their impressive swashbuckling moves and creative perspectives, are fore runners of this talented young platoon. Virat Kohli is all of twenty three and he has already crossed the thousand run mark. His ‘run getter’ status and escalating sense of maturity has even put him in line to be next in command of the Indian team. While some players like Rohit Sharma faded away just as quickly as they peaked, without so much as leaving a mark, other players such as Ravichandran Ashwin are on a steady path to meteoric rise. Suresh Raina might not be well suited for the longer versions of the game, but he is a spit fire when it comes to One Day Internationals and Twenty twenty series. Umesh Yadav is yet another prodigy in the making, while Varun Aaron can aptly be described as an ‘up and coming’ player. Bhuvneshwar Kumar profile is known for achieving the rare feat of dismissing Cricket maestro- Sachin Tendulkar for a duck in first-class cricket.
Even though our prominent players are retiring in a row, India has no reason to panic as fresh talent promises to yield more fruits.
