Former national selection committee chairman, Kiran More feels that Mohinder Amarnath’s revelation about the BCCI president’s interference in selection matters were “not in good taste”.
“I think it is a very confidential area. When you become a selector, you should know what are the rules of BCCI and its constitution. I differ with him (Amarnath) and it is not good for Indian cricket. The selection room is very confidential and nothing should come out of it,” said More.
“I feel very bad. It is sad for Indian cricket. It is not in good taste. As a cricketer I feel, whatever issues you may have against a player should stay inside the room.
“You can write your report to the board, but coming and speaking to the media and saying he should have been dropped or not is not good and it should have stayed within the meeting room,” he told reporters here.
Former national selector Amarnath had dropped a bombshell when he said that all the five selectors had decided to sack Mahendra Singh Dhoni in January this year, but BCCI president N. Srinivasan had intervened and disapproved the decision.
More said that the previous selection committee should have focused on building a new team.
“Only thing I feel is that we should have done more work after 2011. After we won the World Cup the process to build a good team should have started. That is where I have a question mark.
“The new selection committee is just a month old. We need to give them time. They are under tremendous pressure. We need to look ahead and look into the process of building a good team. We might have a couple of bad years but we have a lot of talented cricketers who can represent the country,” the former wicketkeeper said.
More said that the India’s Test team is likely to find it tough at least till the next year and the selection committee needs to develop a pool of talented cricketers to pick from.
“We need some process going and create healthy competition in the team. You need to have a pool of 25 players with options for fast bowlers, openers, middle order. But after 2011 we kept on playing with the same team in Test as well in ODIs,” said More.
“They could have given a chance to someone like Badrinath or Ajinkya Rahane who are doing well in domestic cricket. We could have had a pool of 10 fast bowlers. We could have created backup for Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma and Umesh Yadav but that didn’t happen. We need to learn these lessons.
“The new selection committee will have to work hard and create a good Test team for the future. I think the Test team will struggle for a year and a half. In ODIs and T20s we will do well,” he added.
The former cricketer also defended Dhoni, saying he has a lot of cricket left in him to play in all formats of the game.
“Dhoni has lot of cricket left. He is an outstanding cricketer. Overall the team is not doing well. As a player he is still good enough to play in all forms of the game,” insisted More.
