Way To Pakistan

It is a right move on the part of the Team India selectors to recall Sourav Ganguly and Zaheer Khan to the Indian squad touring Pakistan. Ganguly's experience and performance against Pakistan is supposed to add further to the confidence of the team, which is already upbeat, having got the better of Sri Lanka in a comprehensive way in the recent home series. Zaheer Khan had to be recalled, not only because Ajit Agarkar is not yet a consistent wicket-taker in Tests and Rudra Pratap Singh is too inexperienced, but more so because he has been bagging loads of wickets for months in the domestic circuit. Gautam Gambhir is under pressure, he having been unable to switch over to the Test mode from the One-day style. Moreover, Wasim Jaffer has not been stopping short of a hundred these days in the domestic matches. It would be too much to expect Parthiv Patel to get a berth in the final eleven ahead of Mahendra Singh Dhoni. However, Patel with his more than effective no-nonsense batting, can find a place in the Indian middle order, or even as a opener, in case a batsmen gets injured. The very fact that no spinner other Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh have been picked for the tour shows that, the rest of the breed in India are not worth an India cap as yet. The likes of Piyush Chawla, Madhusudan Acharya, Sourasish Lahiri, Yogesh Golwalkar need to be delivering the goods on a more consistent basis to pose a challenge to the established spin-twins.