Under the captaincy of Hardik Pandya, team India reigned supreme in the T20I series against Sri Lanka. Charismatic batter Suryakumar Yadav played another match-winning knock (112* of 51 deliveries) in the third match of the series which helped the Men in Blue win their first bilateral series of the year. With that, Pandya is yet to suffer a series loss as India’s captain and is one of the favorites to replace Rohit Sharma as the skipper in the shortest format of the game.
However, former Indian cricketer, Ajay Jadeja reckons that Pandya and the entire team management should introduce more all-rounders in T20 cricket. Jadeja highlighted that the former Indian skipper, MS Dhoni was a champion in selecting a perfect playing XI and India should once again use the same strategy by bringing in more all-rounders.
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During a recent chat with Cricbuzz, Ajay Jadeja said, “If I have five bowlers and I am playing, you know exactly, either I will bowl X, Y, or Z. So, you can plan as an opposition, but if I have seven-eight bowlers who could bowl at different stages. How does the opposition plan against you? So, you run the game. Mahendra Singh Dhoni was a champion at it.”
He further added, “There’ll be days that Ravindra [Jadeja] didn’t bowl a single ball. Say, if you put in all four (Hardik Pandya, Washington Sundar, Axar Patel, Ravindra Jadeja), you can play all four. What’s wrong with that? Because they can all bat well enough.”
The former cricketer also spoke about the adversities of playing too many all-rounders. The 51-year-old said that in case of team India uses this strategy, then their bowling might look a bit weaker.
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Ajay Jadeja further explained, “It’s just a wild thought. You can even add another all-rounder, say, bowler all-rounder, Ashwin kind of a person as well. The problem is that you still keep the top five-six batsmen, then add these guys as all-rounders and the bowling is a little weaker.”
