Jay Shah has effectively rendered Team India selectors jobless with Rohit Sharma announcement

Predicting the India squad for 2024 T20 World Cup is going to be quite a task. Will Virat Kohli or Ishan Kishan play? Who will partner Jasprit Bumrah in the pace department? Should Shivam Dube and Ravi Bishnoi be included? Answers to all these questions are unclear and most of them will come through the Indian Premier League (IPL). But there are a few guarantees that have already been dished by none other than Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary Jay Shah.

Rohit Sharma will be India’s captain and not Hardik Pandya (he will be vice-captain).

Rahul Dravid will be India’s head coach.

It’s good that these announcements have been made with still some time to go for the tournament, which starts on 1 June and will be played in West Indies and the USA.

Jay Shah on T20 World Cup, domestic cricket: What all did the BCCI secretary say

It provides stability, shows the cricket board’s confidence in the job Rohit and Dravid are doing and also brings an end to all the rumour-mongering that has been going on in media regarding the captaincy role.

But if there’s one drawback, it is in the manner in which the decision was announced. Or more pointedly, it’s that it didn’t come from the people responsible for taking these calls. It wasn’t the chief selector who declared that Rohit will captain Men in Blue during the T20 World Cup or the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) members who assured Dravid of an India job till the ICC tournament.

These decisions came from the secretary of the board and while he is the principal administrator in BCCI, selecting the captain for the national team isn’t one of his deliverables.

One can argue that Shah has made the right call by selecting Rohit as the captain over Pandya given the all-rounder’s history of injuries and India’s impressive performance at the ODI World Cup last year or that his announcement was merely a confirmation of something that selectors had mulled. But none of this can be used to justify in any way a secretary making the selection calls, more so in front of the chairman of national selectors himself (Ajit Agarkar).

First, it’s not a secretary’s job to pick the teams. It’s a specialised job that has to be performed by experts. After all, these players are going to represent the country at the international level. The selection process needs to be transparent and performed without any influence.

Second, if the all-powerful secretary has made a decision, can we expect the selectors to overrule it in future if they deem it necessary? Can Rohit not be picked as India captain if he has a poor IPL?

Even in our wildest imagination, it looks impossible that selectors will change their mind on Rohit’s decision unless the push once again comes from the very top.

One of the reasons Australia have dominated world cricket in the way they have is because of their professionalism. In Australia and England, it’s the managing directors and the selectors who are responsible for shaping the team — picking players, devising strategies and ensuring performance in tandem with the captain and coach.

Unfortunately that professionalism is missing with the world’s richest cricket board.

If India go on to have an abject outing in the T20 World Cup, will we be able to lay the blame on the captain, coach and selectors, if a national team is not run through a professional process?

There’s more to it. Shah was also asked about Virat Kohli and Mohammed Shami’s availability and he said a decision on them will be taken later.

“We will talk about Virat later,” Shah said.

“We will inform you when Shami gets fit,” he added.

All these calls in a professional setup should have been made by the selectors, but all these have come through the BCCI secretary, while selectors continue to shun responsibility by not holding press conferences after squad selections.