Is Duncan Fletcher being made a scapegoat...?

New Delhi: By appointing Ravi Shastri, a former India captain, as a director for ODI series against England which humiliated India in the test series by 3-1 win, BCCI might have given a single to Fletcher either go out or be booted out but isn't it like treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease…?We have had the history of knee jerk reactions. Will sacking the chief coach remove the rot that has set in the Indian Team…? Surely not. At this level a coach is not supposed to be teaching the basics to the players rather job is only to detect the flaws and correct them.We are sure Duncan must have discussed these flaws in the team meeting every time our top order batsmen fell like a house of cards and must have worked with them in the nets too. If one looks at the dismissals in the just concluded test series, he/she would notice that most of the time Indian batsmen kept feeding English fielders with dolliest of dollies catches in the slip cordon.There is a saying old habits die hard. True….the Indian cricket is played, learnt and nurtured on wickets that are slow and almost dead as far as swing is concerned. Its not for nothing that Indian batsmen get most of their runs on deliveries directed at their pads. With no swing and bounce, they very stylishly and easily dispatch them for runs without any problem.But it becomes a different ball game once these same batsmen step on a foreign soil. You just can't expect them to change their style or for that matter, method they are used to for years. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman were exceptions who adopted to alien conditions and changed game accordingly and that's why they are among the finest batsmen this game has seen so far.Whenever team India suffers such kind of defeats, immediately there is demand for making fast and bouncy wickets so that our batsmen can cope up with the fearsome bowlers who visit India. But fearing that they might lose on home ground also, BCCI ignores the reality and cricket is continued the way it has been.India's slip catching has been worse. They kept granting lives to the English batsmen. How can any team think of winning a game while being so generous with rivals.This was a major reason for India's ignominy.Even Mahendra Singh Dhoni's wicket-keeping has been atrocious. He has frequently dropped catches, and missed stumpings and run outs. His work with the gloves has simply been shocking. He was never of international quality -- nothing has changed.Now coming back to Duncan, its very easy to put the entire blame on a coach and wash your hands off because coaches can be replaced overnight because they are available in big number in India and as well as abroad. If Duncan is the main culprit for drubbing at the hands of England so are Dhawans, Pujaras, Rahanes, Kohlis, Jadejas for simple reason they just refused to see their mistakes and kept committing the same mistakes again and over again.Can BCCI dump Kohli, Dhawan, Pujara, Rahane, Rohit, Jadeja….? Certainly not because the question is who will replace them. So BCCI very conveniently made Duncan a scapegoat and swept the dust under the carpet. If defeat has upset BCCI so much, can it change the captain MS Dhoni who was criticized for his captaincy not only by foreign players but also by Indians…? The answer is NO because it would require a Herculean task to find his replacement and in the current scenario even this task won't yield any result.Even we have a world class coach in place of Duncan, can anybody, who has some knowledge of cricket, say without any iota of doubt that Team India will not meet the same fate when they tour Australia later this year

Is Duncan Fletcher being made a scapegoat...?

New Delhi: By appointing Ravi Shastri, a former India captain, as a director for ODI series against England which humiliated India in the test series by 3-1 win, BCCI might have given a single to

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