No Country For Old Reserves

For these colossuses of domestic cricket the call to national duty came in dribs and drabs, naught to some. Still, the love for the game keeps these gifted hands going.

- Qaiser Mohammad Ali

THEY have been the stalwarts of domestic cricket but somehow they never got their due commensurate to their consistent and outstanding performances over the years. Some of them represented the junior and senior Indian teams briefly while the others, unfortunately, always remained on the threshold of representing the country for various reasons and circumstances.

Even if some of them, like tireless opening batsman Wasim Jaffer, got opportunities, they were either limited or were tested in extremely difficult conditions. At times, there were simply no vacancies in the national team, particularly for wicketkeepers who got only stop-gap chances as Mahendra Singh Dhoni virtually made that spot his own through his excellent performance. Madhya Pradesh’s Naman Ojha, Parthiv Patel of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu’s Dinesh Karthik are some of the stumpers from the Dhoni era to warm up the bench or pirouette on the sidelines.

The never-say-die Devendra Bundela, the unflinching pillar of Madhya Pradesh batting for most of the 23 years he played first-class cricket, was also unlucky. The selectors never seriously considered him beyond the India under-19 or the ‘A’ team; one reason was that the Indian team’s middle-order was chock-a-block with the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and V.V.S. Laxman during most of the 1990s and later.