Sanjay Manjrekar was disappointed with Team India selecting Ravindra Jadeja in the playing XI for the World Test Championship final. Manjrekar stated that the decision to play Jadeja the batsman backfired like it always does as there wasn’t much turn on offer for the southpaw to exploit with the ball.
While picking up his playing XI before the start of the WTC final, Sanjay Manjrekar had included Hanuma Vihari, a specialist batsman in place of Ravindra Jadeja. Manjrekar has once again gone on to suggest that Jadeja is not yet good enough to play for India’s Test team purely based on his batting skills.
“If you have to look at how India went about before the game started, picking two spinners was always a debatable selection especially when the conditions were overcast and the toss was delayed by a day,” Manjrekar told ESPNcricinfo.
“They picked one player for his batting, which was Jadeja, and his left-arm spin wasn’t the reason he was picked. He was picked for his batting and that is something that I am always against.”
“You have got to pick specialist players in the team and if they felt that the pitch was dry and turning, they would have picked Jadeja for his left-arm spin, along with Ashwin, that would have made sense. But they picked him for his batting and I think that backfired as mostly it does,” Manjrekar added.
“Had they had a specialist batsman in Hanuma Vihari for example, who had a pretty good defence, that would have been handy. Maybe 170 could have been 220, 225 or 230, who knows?” he added.
“But I hope India don’t do what England have historically done, pick somebody because there is another strength that they have and that strength might just come to good use, but very rarely it does when it’s a pressure game,” he said.
India conceded a 32-run first innings and then got bundled out for 170 in the second innings on the Reserve Day of the rain-marred match. With almost 2 sessions left, New Zealand chased down the 139-run target with 8 wickets remaining on Wednesday.
