Hardly An Opportunity For All-rounders

Yalaka Venugopal Rao, Suresh Raina and Jai Prakash Yadav were supposed to be all-rounders. But in the Indian Oil Cup tri-series in Sri Lanka only Raina was given a bowl, where he failed to impress. And while Rao was never asked to bowl, Yadav did not get to play a single match. Is India seriously in the look out for an all-rounder? Perhaps not. Otherwise, Harbhajan Singh would have scored a test century by now, as Daniel Vettori has done for the Kiwis. If Abdul Razzaq could have batted at Number Three in the 1999 World Cup, in seaming English conditions, Irfan Pathan, with his sound technique and mental fortitude, should have been allowed to try his hands at doing the same.