Hope this one won’t hurt India much, as not including a leg-spinner in the 15-member World Cup squad, Team India may have made a strategic blunder. With big grounds in Australia, a leggie like Karn Sharma could have come in handy. The belief is it’s not easy to hit a leg-spinner out of a big park at will, if that spinner is persistent with his line and length, and Karn is pretty darned persistent.
The selectors and a bunch of cricket pundits have already given the thumbs up to the current team for the World Cup, and they have their reasons for doing so. But, in hindsight, a leg-spinner could have added variety to the Indian spin attack. Right now India have three spinners in the line-up — Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel.
The good thing about Karn is that he was in Australia with the team for more than a month in the Test series. He even played the opening Test match against Australia and has four wickets to his credit. He wasn’t successful like Aussie off-spinner Nathan Lyon, in the Adelaide Test, but he is someone who could have been a handy customer in the ODI scheme of things.
If the selectors thought that Karn didn’t have enough experience to be a part of the World Cup team, then Axar wouldn’t have been selected as the second left-arm spinner in the team along with Jadeja. Inducting a leg-spinner wasn’t in the agenda.
Even experienced leg-spinner Amit Mishra, who has the temperament to play international cricket and is the most experienced spinner in the Indian set-up, was not even considered. Mind it, this is the same Mishra who got four wickets for India in his last outing.
On the other hand Mishra is dubbed as someone who is very slow and is a sitting duck for the opponents’ batsmen. If a leggie like Imran Tahir, who is a reliable bet for South Africa, could get some purchase in Australia during the World Cup, India might regret the decision of not selecting a bowler who is a leg-spinner. In the last World Cup team, India had picked Piyush Chawla in its ranks and he was in the playing XI ahead of R Ashwin that time. Probably, India’s priority now is to have the luxury of two left-armers than accommodate a leg-spinner!
