Badrinath should be next in line

[Chandan]

Hold on ... Badrinath has been to Australia and scored against Aus A and NZL A ' date=' and recently scored a double-ton against SAF A. It does not make sense, you refer to an instance where he failed against England last year ... he had ONE bad innings ... ONE ... and that was enough to conclude that he is not good enough to be a Test player. [b']Following that match was a tour of Australia where he averaged 82 (which was the 2nd highest average of that tour) and faced bowlers like Tait, Johnson, Hilfenhaus and Watson, who are now mostly international, on Australian pitches and still played some good knocks. Then this year when the SAF A team came to India he hit 200. Add to that consistent form in Ranji Trophy, Challenger Trophy (even though I am not talking about ODIs), Irani Trophy and most other domestic tournaments.

Bharat, I had followed that top end tour very closely and live, albeit on nets only. Uthappa and Gambhir did much better than Badri in the entire tour. As far as scoring on Australian pitches is concerned, they were at Cairns and Darwin and not the usual Australian pitches. They were the low and slow flat tracks.Besides there was a very confusing modus operandi of that tour on which no team could win any series be it One Dayer or FC matches.

Well if ODIs are the way to go ... how do you explain Jaques' selection for Tests ? He had 1 good ODI match but in the rest he did nothing and has an average of 20 in ODIs. Here is further proof of how ODI form doesnt affect Test selection ... * VVS Laxman was selected in Tests before ODIs. * Sachin Tendulkar did aswell. * Rahul Dravid was put into ODIs first (only 3 months before), but his performances were pretty average (3,4,3,11,22), yet he still got selected in the Test team and made 95 on debut. * Sourav Ganguly played 2 ODIs before his test debut where he made a 2 and a 46. * Brian Lara played 1 ODI and made 11 before his Test debut * Ricky Ponting averaged 28 in ODIs before his Test debut * Michael Vaughan debuted in Tests before he debuted in ODIs * Ian Bell debuted in Tests before he debuted in ODIs * Stephen Fleming debuted in Tests before he debuted in ODIs * Jacques Kallis debuted in Tests before he debuted in ODIs

Forget about foreign players because they play in different structure. Just name one recent batsman in India who was introduced straightaway in test. I couldn't name anyone apart from Jaffer!

[chirag]

Badrinath has got fantastic stats and seems a dravid type of player, but the domestic circuit is so tough...there are also players like raina, m.tiwary, partiv patel waiting with big performances.. lets c how it goes

[bharat297]

Bharat, I had followed that top end tour very closely and live, albeit on nets only. Uthappa and Gambhir did much better than Badri in the entire tour. As far as scoring on Australian pitches is concerned, they were at Cairns and Darwin and not the usual Australian pitches. They were the low and slow flat tracks.Besides there was a very confusing modus operandi of that tour on which no team could win any series be it One Dayer or FC matches.

I wouldn't say Uthappa did better than Badrinath. Badrinath scored a 50+ in every innings that he played on that tour. Badrinath's scores were 55, 70*, 59 and 63, this included a matchwinning performance against NZL A. Uthappa had good moments but wasn't as consistent as Badrinath with scores of 4, 5*, 72, 15, 0, 9, 50 and 67*. Regardless of whether Gambhir (I already said earlier that Gambhir did better) did better than him on that tour, the point is Badrinath has faced a few international bowlers (like Tait and Johnson) in conditions that are different to India, and has done well. Now Badrinath may not have scored a big century on this tour, however he has done that on the more recent series against SAF A where he notched up a double-century.

Forget about foreign players because they play in different structure. Just name one recent batsman in India who was introduced straightaway in test. I couldn't name anyone apart from Jaffer!

Well thats difficult because there havent been many "recent" batsman in Tests anyway. But here are some ... * Wasim Jaffer * Aakash Chopra * Dinesh Karthik (played 2 ODIs and scored 1 run before his Test debut) * Parthiv Patel * Sanjay Bangar * Gautam Gambhir (played 5 ODIs and scored 1 fifty against Bangladesh) * SS Das