BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia has called for soul-searching over embarrassing defeats in Ireland and England in June-July. World champions India played minnows Ireland in Belfast but shockingly, they lost both T20I games. Then in England, they lost a five-T20I series 4-0, with one match being a washout. In the following ODI series, they once again came a cropper and lost 2-1. Basically, nine full white-ball games, and India lost 8 of them!
After a BCCI review meeting in Mumbai on Thursday, Saikia admitted that the Indian team played badly in the United Kingdom. “You all know that we lost matches in Ireland and also in England. We wanted to know what the reasons are, and we have to do some soul-searching about that. And in future, what we will be doing before going to any of the SENA countries, we have discussed some strategies,” he said.
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“Our main intention is that we should have the best team combination in the months of October, November next year, in the ODI World Cup. We have basically thought about what should be our way forward with our team preparation and all, because we have a lot of series now,” he added.
The BCCI secretary also informed that the increasing cases of players’ injury were also a matter of great concern and were discussed in the meeting that had Gautam Gambhir, Shreyas Iyer, Shubman Gill and VVS Laxman in attendance.
“Individual players are having injuries because they have to play a lot of matches. If you look at their schedule, if you look at England, a 15-player team went for the ODIs and out of the 15, three to four players got injured.
“But they had played two months of IPL prior to that. So all this takes a toll on the health of the players also. And to avoid those kinds of situations, what is best we can do under the present windows and present FTPs, we are trying to find some ways out.
“The only challenges which we are facing is that there are too many matches in the year, and that is why in the next FTP, we will do certain things, we will take certain measures. We have instructed our FTP person, who we will be meeting very soon in various international forums, that our FTP should be scheduled in such a way that there is proper rest for the players as well as some kind of acclimatisation or some kind of friendly matches before any major series in SENA countries,” he said.