Since the 2021 T20 World Cup, India have had as many as eight captain across formats which includes former captain Virat Kohli and present all-format skipper Rohit Sharma. BCCI’s selection committee did mentioned earlier this year that they are grooming a few players to take over the leadership role from Rohit in the future, but the continuous change in captaincy has led to many veterans and experts criticising the move. However, board president Sourav Ganguly had a rather straightforward to critics on this captaincy-change trend.
Rohit was named as India’s all-format captain shortly after Kohli had stepped down from Test captaincy earlier in January. BCCI had mentioned that KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant and Jasprit Bumrah are among the names that the team management will aim to groom for future leadership role.
However, besides the aforementioned four names and Ajinkya Rahane, who had led India in the Kanpur Test against New Zealand last November, India have handed captaincy duties to Hardik Pandya and Shikhar Dhawan as well. Hardik led the Indian side in two T20Is in Ireland while Dhawan led a second-string side in the Windies ODI series.
Explaining the decision in his interview with India Today, Ganguly opined that with players involved in so many international matches, they do need injury-breaks and this in turn as helped India in giving opportunities to more fringe players.
“Rohit Sharma is now the all-format captain. And they play so much, injuries are bound to happen and hence they do need injury-breaks. This gives the advantage that there are a lot of new players who have come up. And we won in West Indies and in England with these new bunch of players. India now have a pool of 30 players who can now play for the national team anytime,” he said.
Earlier, former India cricketer Aakash Chopra and ex-national selector Saba Karim had both questioned the logic behind this trend.
“The kind of change in captaincy trend is strange and questionable. Such decisions need to be taken very cautiously. There is no need to rush as it is associated with a team environment, you need to build the team spirit. A captain begins to think about his plans for upcoming matches and then you suddenly make a change. It affects the morale of the cricketer,” Karim had told India New Sports.