Mumbai: Recently, team India escalated to top ranking of ICC ‘Test Match’ format, under the captaincy of star batsman Virat Kohli. Also, Virat Kohli becomes first Indian captain to win five successive Test series.
With that, there was a glimpse of some rumour that shimmered in between, vindicating him as the captain for all the formats. However, recent opinionated statements given by India’s World Cup winning Captain Kapil Dev, subsidised the smoke of rumour.
“I think the answer people should look for is are we ready to ask Dhoni to take a back seat. It is more important. I think if he is good enough he should carry on. When the time will come Dhoni may quit all three formats,” Kapil said.
“But I think at the moment it is very important Dhoni is doing a good job. I think he has enough experience and he should continue,” he added.
At many points of time the captaincy of ‘Captain Cool’ has been compared with that of ‘Captain courageous’, with that move, When Kapil Dev was asked to compare both them celebrity players, he said:- “It is too early to answer that and again the two individuals are different and every individual is different. Kohli is very expressive, while Dhoni is calm and quite. I think it is very difficult to compare because both have different teams and different attitude.”
“Things have changed. Tomorrow you may ask can you compare these two with Sourav Ganguly as captain. So, every captain brings in his own input and aggression and motivation but it all depends on how you use these things with your team for best results. That is captaincy.
It is not that you have to be aggressive and if you are not aggressive still you win the match, it is good enough,” Kapil said.
The former swing bowler heaped praise on Indian seamers, saying they have all improved a lot.
“It is not about 140 plus speed that Indian bowlers achieve but the line and length is very important. If you can bowl 135 speed and get movement, that is good enough. But again, if you have pace, you always get advantage of that,” Kapil said.
“These days the boys work on that. It is good to see that they have the pace. Bhuvneshwar, Ishant, Umesh, Shami all bowl that speed. Fast bowlers have improved a lot,” he added.
On Friday, India’s fielding coach R Sridhar said that the home team should have done better in close in catching. Contrary to the Sridhar’s belief, Kapil postulates the overall fielding of the home team as moving on a progressive track.
“I think basically the Indian fielding has improved a lot since our time. But still one can understand that all the XI fielders are not the same. They have two or three brilliant fielders in the side,” he said.
“If the majority of the players in a side also improve then the fielding could become better. When you talk about fielding in a team, everyone has to be good enough.”