Former Indian captain and chairman of selectors Dilip Vengsarkar is not happy with how Sourav Ganguly handled the situation which created a controversy in Indian Cricket.
Just before departing for the South Africa tour, Team India’s red ball skipper Virat Kohli confronted the media and said that no one from BCCI had reached out to him regarding talks of him staying as captain across formats for India. Kohli added that his decision to give up the captaincy in the shortest format of the game was taken in a positive way by the BCCI officials.
Earlier Ganguly said that he personally asked Virat Kohli to stay as the captain of Team India in T20Is. But when Kohli refused to do so the selectors decided to remove him from ODI captaincy as the Board doesn’t want two white ball skippers.
“We had requested Virat not to step down as T20 captain but he didn’t want to continue as captain. So, the selectors felt that they cannot have two white ball captains in two white-ball formats. That’s too much of leadership,” the BCCI president had told earlier.
Virat Kohli’s comments contradicted to what Ganguly said earlier and the controversy began from here.
Speaking on the issue, Dilip Vengsarkar said, “The thing is that Ganguly had no business to speak on behalf of the selection committee. Ganguly is the president of BCCI. Any issue about selection or captaincy, it’s the chairman of the selection committee who should speak.”
The former Indian captain and chairman of selectors feels that Ganguly should not have spoken in behalf of the selectors and should have let the national selectors deal with it in order to avoid the ongoing controversy.
“Ganguly spoke about the whole thing, obviously Virat wanted to make his case clear. I believe it should have been between the chairman of the selection committee and the captain. A captain is selected or removed by the selection committee, that’s not Ganguly’s jurisdiction at all,” the former India batter pointed out”, he added.
Team India are scheduled to play three test matches and as many ODIs starting from December 26 in Centurion.