Asia Cup Cricket

Sachin rested, Yuvraj dropped

Left-Hander's Lack Of Fitness And Form Led To His Ouster; Ashwin, Dinda Rewarded For Decent Show In Zimbabwe

New Delhi: The Indian cricket board (BCCI) has accepted Sachin Tendulkiar's request to be allowed to rest and has not included him in the squad for the Asia Cup. TOI had reported on Monday that the master batsman was likely to sit out of the One-day tournament.

          The national selectors, who met in the Capital on Monday to pick the 15-member team for the event (June 15 to 24 in Sri Lanka), have also given Yuvraj Singh plenty of time to rest and find his form by leaving him out of the squad. Another buccaneer, Yusuf Pathan too failed to find a place. The beneficiary of the droppings was Saurabh Tiwary, the young Jharkhand batsman, who gets his first chance to showcase his talent on the international stage.

         As expected, some of the seniors who were rested for the Zimbabwe tri-series, which turned out to be a disaster for the team, have come back to lend slidity to the combination.

        Skipper MS Dhone, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Ashish Nehra will be spearheading the campaign in the Emerald Isles against tough opponents like the hosts and Pakistan.

        While chairman of selectors, Kris Srikkanth did not say it directly, he did hint that lack of fitness primarily went against Yuvraj who has been fighting niggles as well as poor form in the past few months. The selectors looked at players' performance in the last 12 months before making up their mind. Yuvraj has 495 runs in this period at an average of 33, not too bad. But poor fitness and falling fielding standards cost his dear.

        After the squad was announced, Srikkanth said: "A lot of stress was ginen on the fitness of a player. Fitness and fielding are very important/ We have gone through the record of last one year and did a detailed analysis. Recently, we lost some matches or struggled in some because of poor fielding. on fielding. We also looked at consistency.

       The selectors expect that Yuvraj would use the break and work on his fitness before he wears the Indian jersey again. With the Worlod Cup coming up in 2011, they are hoping that the southpaw would be back in prime form as he remains an important cog in India's wheels, especially in ODIs.

        As for Tendulkar, BCCI informed that he wanted to spend time with his family, keeping in view the long season ahead. Tendulkar's absence, though, would put huge pressure on rest of the batsmen because it's they who are expected to win matches for India, and not the bowlers.

      Two fringe players who went to Zimbabwe but have managed to retain their places despite the team's bad showing are Tamil Nadu off-spinner R Ashwin, a handy restrictive bowler, and Bengal medium-pacer Ashok Dinda. Ravindra Jadeja retained his place as the utility man.

      Meanwhile, Srikkanth defended the selection of a second-string team for Zimbabwe, saying that at least some youngsters were tested, "How else do you try them? People say our selection backfired but how? We wanted to know how good some of the youngsters are."

       He had an advice for the fans: "Don't get carried away with one or two series. It's continuous process.