India at U-19 World Cup: Here’s looking at you kids
Sometime last month, some of the talented teenage cricketers in India were huddled around Rahul Dravid in a room. They were in the U-19 camp, their minds on the U-19 World Cup which is just a few months away, and Dravid, their coach, was telling them not to worry if they were not selected.
A young boy who was there remembers Dravid sharing a conversation he had with the more senior players in the India A team that he had coached couple of months ago.
“I asked the India A players how many of you had played U-19 for India? Just four or five hands went up. The rest had not played for India at that level but have gone to play for India, and some will get to play for India in some time hopefully.”
The balloon of pressure around the U-19 selection that hung on that room was deflated by that simple and sensible talk from the former India captain. “I still obviously wanted to play for U-19,” that boy says now, but “it was nice hearing from a big player that it was not something that I should get depressed about. Our job is to continue scoring runs and getting wickets.”
On Tuesday 15 of those teenagers found a place in the Indian team that will head, along with Dravid, to Bangladesh in January for the World Cup. The squad has players from around the country led by Jharkhand’s Ishan Kishan. It’s a team that has done well in the recent past — they have just won a couple of tri-nation tournaments — one involving Sri Lanka and England, and other against Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
In the World Cup, India have been grouped with Australia, New Zealand and Nepal in the first round and will start the tourney with a game against Australia on January 28 in Mirpur in the outskirts of Dhaka.
The U-19 World Cup was launched in 1988 but didn’t take place for the next 10 years. In 2000, two years after it was revived, India won under Mohammad Kaif who broke through to the national team with Yuvraj Singh. Later, Virat Kohli won another World Cup and there has been much hype about it ever since, especially in these IPL years. Even though just 20 percent of those who played for India U-19, have made it to national team, the buzz that it’s closely watched by the IPL talent scouts has kept up the hype and glamour, apart from a possible ticket to Ranji Trophy.
Perhaps it’s not a surprise then that the Indian cricket board has had to deal with the clear and present danger of age-fudging at this level. In his MAK Patuadi lecture at the start of this month, Dravid called it “dangerous and toxic” and equated it with “fixing and corruption”. “The truth is that the player who has faked his age might make it at the junior level not necessarily because he is better or more talented, but because he is stronger and bigger,” Dravid said. “We all know how much of a difference a couple of years can make at that age. That incident will have another ripple effect: an honest player deprived of his place by an overage player, is disillusioned. We run the risk of losing him forever.”
The cricket board has tried hard to stop it with its age-testing procedures but someone somewhere always slips through. In 2013-14, the board had found 230 players over-aged with the new testing method called Tanner-Whitehouse 3 (TW3) which determines the age based on growth of bones in the hand, especially the wrist. It has a margin of 6 months, which is better than the two-years of the previous method, but it can’t be used to test at u-19 level as all the bones fuse after the age of 16, thus rendering the Tw3 tests useful till the U-16 level.
It’s in this competitive environment that the current bunch of kids will turn out for India as in their parents’ mind, and by extension in their heads, the U-19 world cup could lead to a rosier future. Luckily, for Indian cricket, someone as sorted out as Dravid is at the helm who doesn’t make U-19 tournament as ‘all or nothing’. Despite all the rationale and sane talk, the potential rewards – the perception of it at least – makes it a pressure-cooker situation for some parents and kids.
India U-19 squad: Ishan Kishan (captain), Rishabh Pant (vice-captain), Washington Sundar, Sarfaraz Khan, Amandeep Khare, Anmolpreet Singh, Arman Jaffer, Ricky Bhui, Mayank Dagar, Zeeshan Ansari, Mahipal Lomror, Avesh Khan, Shubham Mavi, Khaleel Ahmed, Rahul Batham.
