MADRAS: Tamil Nadu all-rounder Robin Singh has finally got the recognition he deserves. The Trinidad born cricketer, who has been making. waves on the national scene in the last couple of seasons, is among the 17 picked to tour the West Indies for a series of five one dayers, four Test matches and four other first class matches,
The team, announced by Mr. Ranbir Singh, Secretary, Board of Control for Cricket in India is: Dilip Vengsarkar (captain), K, Srikkanth (vice-captain), Arun Lal Nayjot Sidhu, Mohammad Azharuddin, Kapil Dev, Ravi Shastri, Kiran More, Narendra Hirwani, Arshad Ayub, Sanjeev Sharma, Sanjay Manjrekar, Sabba Karim and M. Venkatramana,
No place could be found for Tamil Nadu’s W.V. Raman, Karnataka’s Roger Binny, Delhi’s Maninder Singh, Maharashtras Salil Ankola, Bombay’s Chandrakant Pandit or Madhya Pradesh’s T.A. Sekhar. The listing of players according to the associations they represent is important. For in the tcam are three players each from Bombay and Tamil Nadu, two each from Delhi, Haryana and Hyderabad and one cach from Bengal, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Baroda,
The chairman of the selection committee had been quite clear in his mind that what he was looking for was a team of “seven batsmen, two wicketkeepers, Kapil Dev plus three seamers and Ravi Shastri plus three spinners.”
Six of the seven batsmen choose themselves. Ajay Sharma getting the nod over W.Y. Raman was the surprise here
The support to Kapil also must have caused discussion. With both Sahjeev Sharma and Robin Singh more or less certain, the forth place would have seen a battle among Sekhar Binny and Chetan Sharma. The one thing in Chetan Sharma’s favor is that he is the youngest of the lot.
That left the wicketkeepers. And here t00 the selectors sprang a surprise by dropping Chandrakant Pandit. The joke in recent times had been that the selectors decided on him for every tour even before they had decided on the captain, Sabba Karim a safe unfussy wicket keeper from Bihar has been in the national squad, but is yet to represent the country.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 3, 1989
