Rahul Dravid's new world of India experiments specific, not for the sake of it

The duo of Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid have tried a lot of things during their time as the Indian skipper and head coach, respectively. In the recent ODI series against West Indies, the team management took a bold decision and benched Rohit and Virat Kohli in order to give opportunities to youngsters ahead of the ODI World Cup. Not just this, they have done multiple such experiments during their time, but despite so, the team has not won any major trophies.

Hence, there is a sense of frustration among the stakeholders, but justifying everything, Dravid has clarified that the team doesn’t change the combination for the sake of it, but there’s a lot of thinking that goes behind a particular move. 

“This word experimentation gets thrown around a lot without actually sometimes being thought through. It's not that we are trying to sometimes experiment for the sake of experimenting. Sometimes there are specific reasons why you have to do certain things,” Dravid was quoted as saying by ESPNcricinfo.

Dravid further clarified that 18 months back, the team management was pretty confident about the number four, five and sixth spots. However, with Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer and KL Rahul’s injuries, things got a bit tense, and hence, it forced the management to try out new things.

“Just to give you an example, the No. 4 and 5 spots seem to get discussed and talked about a lot. I could have told you 18 or 19 months ago the top two-three candidates we were looking at for the No. 4, 5 slots. It was always going to be Shreyas (Iyer), KL (Rahul) and Rishabh (Pant) for those spots, right?

“If you look back on some of the teams that we picked from 18 months ago, there was no doubt in our minds. Obviously, it's unfortunate that all three of them ended up with injuries in the space of two months. What are the odds of that happening? And I don't think we can, nobody can, calculate for that, especially with the limited number of games that we had in one-day cricket,” Dravid explained.