Finally we have the selection committee back in the fray with their selection process after an exciting week of cricket.The main headline being that the inform Saurav Ganguly has been left out of the squad and Rahul Dravid’s name was not even considered.They want to consider the youngsters for the upcoming also featuring Australia and Sri Lanka.

Suresh Raina is going to make a come back to the International scene after quite sometime now.Even Praveen Kumar has been included in the squad after some good show for UP who ended up as the second best in the Ranji Trophy tornament.

The third UP player in the squad is Piyush Chawla who was included ahead of Murali Karthik as the selectors thought that wrist spinners would have a better say on the Australian wickets.This is debatable as Murali Karthik had done a pretty good job last time the Indians toured Australia.

The fast bowling department has Sreesanth coming in for the injured Zaheer Khan.He was picked ahead of Munaf Patel even though both trained at the National Academy and both were cleared to play.But the selectors felt the Munaf Patel needed some more match practise before he can play in an International game.

Gautam Gambhir, who has cracked three centuries in the Ranji Trophy [two of them match-winning efforts, in the semi-final and final], and Dinesh Karthik have been included. Manoj Tiwary, Yusuf Pathan and Munaf have been placed on standby and will join the squad in case of any injuries.Personally I would have loved to see Mohammed Kaif sneak into the team as he’s quite a good player.I fell that the selectors are being a little rude on the lad.

One thing that I can’t take is the reasons that these selectors give to the media for having selected/dropped a player.It sounds very stupid.They should be bold enough to tell the actual truth.They claim that Ganguly has been left out just because of his poor fielding.He was quite successful during the last year and I’m still wondering why he has been left out.

Time and again Dravid has proved his worth and yet he hasn’t even been spoken off during the selection.If the selectors are looking at the future they should have the guts to speak out in public about this.Rather what they do is they’ll again depend on these seasoned campaigners once the team is in some sort of bad patch.Thats really mean and unfair.

The final squad is as listed below :

Mahendra Singh Dhoni (capt & wk), Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, Dinesh Karthik, Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Irfan Pathan, Praveen Kumar, RP Singh, Ishant Sharma, Sreesanth, Harbhajan Singh, Piyush Chawla

P.S. : It is stated that Dhoni wanted to retain the same squad that won the T 20 World Cup as much as possible.Not sure of this though.