'They should stop dead...' - Sanjay Manjrekar bashes India for playing all-rounders in Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2024

After a crushing defeat against Australia, the cricket experts have gone after the Indian team and the selections made during the entire series. Talking about one such incident, former cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar bashed the Indian team management for playing Washington Sundar in the matches. The team already had Nitish Reddy and Ravindra Jadeja, and the inclusion of Sundar didn't make any sense. 

"They should stop dead in their tracks. (Ravindra) Jadeja, I can understand, but after that, you had a Washington Sundar. You had a Nitish Kumar Reddy, but Jadeja is likely to be more consistent as a batter. India should stop right there and go back to having pure batters and pure bowlers," said Manjrekar during an interaction with ESPN Cricinfo. 

The main reason behind going for all-rounders is the lack of performance from the top-order batters. Hence, the management looks to keep an extra batter in the lower-middle order who can bowl as well. Not having an extra specialist bowler in the team cost India the fifth Test match in Sydney because the pitch was filled with green grass. This indicated that the pace bowlers would get much help from the pitch rather than the spinner. 

Rahul Dravid was a big one on specialists: Sanjay Manjrekar

Sanjay Manjrekar praised Rahul Dravid for going with the specialists in every series, which gave good results to the team. However, Manjrekar criticised Rohit Sharma for not following the tradition after Dravid left. It was on the captain to take the legacy forward, but he failed. The team selection in every match is to be criticised because of the amount of mistakes made by the captain. 

"Rahul Dravid was a big one on specialists and giving everybody a long rope. Somewhere, the onus was more on Rohit Sharma to continue what has been a winning kind of approach. The captain should have played a stronger role in team selection. The more depth India had, the more matches they lost eventually," added Manjrekar.