Graeme Smith has sympathy for his former rival Rahul Dravid, who is now facing the heat as India coach, and suggests that he be given time to “rebuild India.”
“When you get involved in a leadership role in Indian cricket, the expectation is something that you are going to have to come to terms with. There’s a huge quality of players. India can put two or three teams together. The biggest challenge in India for a leader is balancing those squads, balancing your tour schedules, the different formats, and those are some of the biggest decisions that are coming ahead of Rahul and his selection team. What do those squads look like, how do they move those teams forward. He’s a quality man and a quality performer. He’s shown it right through as a coach. So, you’ve got to give him a fair opportunity now to kind of rebuild India,” recommends Smith.
Meanwhile, Talking about SA20’s new rule which requires teams to sign a rookie player in each squad, Smith said, “Last year we had an uncapped player (rule for each franchise). This year, we felt the opportunity was there for us to introduce a kind of a new young player into the system and an opportunity to expose them to the SA20. We’ve seen the benefit of that, in particular at the IPL (in terms of) the introduction, the growth of talent. SA T20 will always be an aspirational league.”
Smith recommends that much of the pressure on Indian captain Rohit Sharma would be off once he gets a few runs under his belt.
“One of the biggest challenges of a captain is your own personal performance. The pressure of a leader never goes away. Rohit probably needs to just refresh. His own form hasn’t been probably at a level consistently. We look at the IPL over a number of years now and obviously the WTC final…he is having a bit of a rough patch and often that personal performance can just settle things down a little bit. No one is criticizing his captaincy or leadership style. It’s just obviously on the personal performance side, if he can get some really good scores behind him, it takes a lot of that pressure away,” analyses Smith.
