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NKP Salve Challenger Trophy 2007
I haven’t covered this tournament as it really is a waste of time with no real sense of which players are good enough to be selected for the Indian squad. You cannot decide an international team based on only a couple of matches. The tournament has not been planned properly with only one game against each other and the final. As it stands after yesterday’s match, India Red are in the final thanks to a bonus point.
In the first match, India Blue were led to victory by a solid innings from Suresh Raina who has vowed to come back into the Indian team. And why not, the bloke has all the right ingredients to play a big part in the future of Indian cricket. The match really should have belonged to Virender Sehwag who was the captain and is also looking to make a comeback into Team India. However, quite unsurprisingly, he managed to goof up this chance again. So did Dinesh Karthik. He continues to get out on the Big O in the shorter format of the game and the selectors would really be thinking if we need Dinesh Karthik as a second wicket-keeper in the squad with Parthiv Patel being a much better batsman.
So there is a new Twenty20 tournament in the West Indies. So its going to be a cash bonanza for the winner. So what. Why is the ICC making a big deal out of this? Well probably because not a single penny goes to their coffers. And the winner gets 4 times what a the World Cup had as its prize for all teams. No wonders ICC is shit-scared at the moment. The highly bureaucratic setup has come in for quite a bit of criticism from the Indian board in recent times. The World Cup itself was criticized for being far too long.