Top four have to be the best players: Ganguly

NEW DELHI: Sourav Ganguly, the former India captain, has urged the current management of the side to persist with their best players, especially in the middle order.

After the 2-1 series loss to England in the ODIs, Virat Kohli admitted the middle order was an area of concern for the side. Ganguly, however, believed the constant chopping and changing of the playing XI hadn’t helped matters.

He pointed to the situation of KL Rahul. The versatile batsman scored a scintillating century in the first Twenty20 International in Manchester, but was dropped for the final ODI in Leeds after three poor scores across formats.

Ganguly said it was priority for India to sort out the No 4 slot in ODIs, and said Rahul was the best candidate for the role. “Your top four have to be the best players, you have to persist with them,” Ganguly told Sony Pictures Network. “Go and speak to KL Rahul, and say ‘I’ll give you 15 games, just go and play’.

“India need a No 4 MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and Dinesh Karthik are very good at five, six and seven. But a top-class player has to be at four.”When specifically asked why India didn’t seem to have a settled side, just a year away from the World Cup, Ganguly didn’t mince words.

“Because they don’t give enough opportunities,” he said. “Rahul got a magnificent hundred in Manchester. In the other two T20Is, he was out to one brilliant catch in Bristol. He was not out in Nottingham, missed out at Lord’s and then he’s dropped. You won’t be able to produce players like that.”

Ganguly added that with a regular, consistent No.4 batsman, the benefit would be felt through the line-up, including with MS Dhoni, who has been struggling to score quickly in recent outings.

“If Dhoni’s got to play, he has to get into positions where he has to keep hitting,” said the former captain. “If he has 24-25 overs to play, you’ve got to build an innings and he’s struggling at the moment.

“He may turn it around, you don’t know what’s in store for great players — he’s been a great player for India in the shorter formats — but at the present moment he’s not been turning it around and it’s been that way for a year, year-and-a-half or probably more.

“So they need a good player at four and five, and then if they think MS Dhoni is the way forward, him at six and Pandya at seven.”

Meanwhile, England captain Eoin Morgan thinks his side’s biggest challenge will be maintaining their consistency ahead of the World Cup 2019 next summer.Morgan’s ODI side have won 14 of their 19 fixtures in 2018 and find themselves at the top of the ODI team rankings.

England extended this lead by two points following a 2-1 series win against India — who sit second in the rankings — when they came back from defeat in the first ODI to claim a seventh straight home series victory.

While England have shown their class playing against sides in recent bi-lateral series, Morgan highlighted the task of playing nine different teams in the round robin stage of the World Cup.“One of the disadvantages is you play a different team every time and that’s hard to replicate,” said Morgan after the final ODI against India.

“The challenge will be trying to show the consistency that we’ve had and continue that hunger to improve. We have a lot of white-ball cricket leading into the World Cup.”

England’s struggles against spin — in particular left-arm wrist spinner Kuldeep Yadav — was one of the reasons behind their T20I series loss to India and defeat in the opening ODI. —