Tendulkar may fill captaincy vacuum after Dravid’s resignation

Sep 15: The Indian cricket once again came to a standstill after Rahul Dravid gave up the post of Indian team captaincy all of a sudden without any inkling. Dravid’s resignation created a huge vacuum for Team India, and raised an obvious and a big question in everybody’s mind that ‘who will be going to lead the Team India now’?

The selectors have a big problem ahead of them as the Australian team is arriving in India on September 25 for a seven match One-day series. Whether they will go for long time solution or it will be only for the forthcoming series. All this speculation will come to an end when the selectors will meet on Sep 18 to select the Indian squad and the captain for the home series against Australia.

If they look back, then there are two serious options: Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, the first of whom himself stepped down from the captaincy, and the other had it taken away because his batting went to pieces. But the buzz is in the air that 34-year old Mumbaikar will come for this hot seat of Indian cricket once again and fill in the shoes of Dravid to bail out Team India from this sudden crisis.

The selection committee will surely want to go for a long time solution then the clear front-runner would be M S Dhoni who is currently leading the Indian team in the ongoing Twenty20 World Cup could well be one of the possibilities. The others who comes under the scanner are Virender Sehwag but he is not presently in the any of the ODI and the Test team so the captaincy issue is much beyond expectation while the other option Yuvraj Singh is struggling to cement his place in the Test team so it will be tough road ahead and hard nut to crack for the selectors in the coming days.

Dravid’s resignation came as a shocker to host of people in the cricketing and media fraternity, as nobody was aware of the fact that he is going to step down from the post of captaincy, after successfully conquering Test series in England that comes after a huge gap of 21 years.

The decision has come on the eve of what is possibly India’s toughest-ever season of cricket up-ahead with series against Australia, Pakistan and South Africa are lining up.

The main reason is still not coming out of the curtains as Board President Sharad Pawar simply quoted Dravid told him of his wish to step down, with immediate effect, when they met on Thursday. Dravid said to pawar, ‘‘The selectors have placed faith in me to lead continuously for two years and I'm grateful for that”. Pawar said to the reporters that as Dravid told him that he would like to concentrate on his batting and the opportunity should be given to a new person to lead the side.

"He has discussed the issue with me twice. I think we need to respect his decision," Pawar said.

Dravid, 34, had captained India in 20 Tests and 62 ODIs since taking over the captaincy from Sourav Ganguly two years ago, following India's tour of Zimbabwe.

Under his captaincy India won eight Tests, including series wins in West Indies, Bangladesh and England. However, his ODI record was patchy; he began on a winning streak, where India set a record for 16 consecutive successful chases. More recently, though, the team had a first-round exit from the World Cup in the Caribbean and lost the NatWest series to England 4-3. As captain, he averaged 44.19 in 25 Tests while in 79 ODIs, he averaged 42.19 as against being only a player his previous average was 60.12 and 39.38 simultaneously. His Test form had dipped in last two series ass he averaged 25 against England recently and 21 on the South Africa tour last year.