01 August,2010 08:24 AM IST | | A Correspondent
The national selection committee seemed to have got most of their decisions right when they met at the BCCI headquarters on Saturday.
The five-man committee, headed by Krishnamachari Srikkanth, has opted to rest Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir and Harbhajan Singh and included Yuvraj Singh in the side that will play a tri-series with hosts Sri Lanka and New Zealand after the third Test of the ongoing series.
While the decision to include or rest Tendulkar has always been with a plan to keep him fit for the 2011 World Cup and Gambhir has been rested because he has been playing all three formats of the game since a long time, the decision to not include Harbhajan Singh is surprising but a correct one. With no experienced spinner in the side and the seam attack missing Zaheer Khan, Bhajji's experience could have been useful.
But the offie has not been in the best of form in the ongoing Test series. Of the 15 Sri Lankan wickets to fall in the two Test matches, Harbhajan has managed just a brace in the second Test after going wicketless in the first. Even part-time offie Virender Sehwag has one more wicket than Bhajji.
The senior offie averages a whopping 152.00 with a strike rate of 263.5 from the 87.5 overs he has bowled ufffd clearly not the kind of statistics one associates with Harbhajan or the ones he would be satisfied with.
A break will mean Harbhajan has the chance to work on the technical glitches that affect every cricketer from time to time. Bhajji is also one of the players who are part of all three formats of the game and hence the break will also help him refresh mentally.
With the World Cup not far away, the selectors have a tough task of maintaining the right balance and ensuring that the players go into the quadrennial event physically and mentally fit. Resting Bhajji, and even Gambhir for that matter, seems to be one such decision.
The team: MS Dhoni (C, WK), Virender Sehwag (VC), Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Saurabh Tiwary, Dinesh Karthik, Ravindra Jadeja, Ashish Nehra, Ishant Sharma, Praveen Kumar, Abhimanyu Mithun, Pragyan Ojha, R Ashwin.
