Picking the Green Fruit

India, land of the mango, prefers to pluck its fruit when it is a little green and not fully sweet. The BCCI selectors do the same thing. They pluck the talent before it is fully ripe. They hope that international exposure will ripen them up quickly. But it might just as easily lead to a ruined career and a squandered talent.

The latest example of the deplorable tendency to pick the unripe fruit is the selection of Piyush Chawla. He is a great talent and he might soon be a star for India. But he is only 17, he has only played one season of Ranji, and he just isn’t ready yet. Sreesanth and Vikram Singh also look very raw. A couple more years in Ranji league would be very beneficial. But for some perverse reason, the selectors seem to think that if they don’t choose these young colts, in a few years these talents will be lost. And there is some reason to worry about that: the idiot selectors three or four years from now will overlook these seasoned professionals for the next U-19 flash-in-the-pan.

Examples of choosing talent too soon abound: Parthiv Patel, Ajay Ratra, Tinu Yohannan, Avishkar Salvi, Amit Mishra, Agit Agarkar, Laxmi Shukla, Amit Bhandari etc. There are several problems associated with choosing players too soon:
1. You might guess wrong and pick a no-talent.
2. The players might fail, and worse, cause the team to lose a big game and feel a sense of having “blown their big chance” for all of the rest of their careers. A little maturity can help deal with the emotional part of the game.
3. The players might not be fully talented yet. Agit Agarkar had some batting ability but also a flawed technique. A few years of Ranji might have helped. Instead, he went to Australia and came back damaged goods.
4. Choosing your U-19 stars over your Ranji stars robs Ranji of its significance. If the only way to make it into the team is to be 18 and super-talented, then you know that if you are already 20, you might as well give up.
5. You need to give them a chance to taste failure and really dislike it. These U-19 players have succeeded at every level in their brief careers. They come to the main team and see failure for the first time. Worse, they see their own inept performance caused the failure. Dealing with failure is a part of the learning process and choosing them too young denies them the opportunity to learn.

If I were the BCCI head, I would make a blanket rule: no one gets selected – no matter what – unless they have played 4 seasons of Ranji. Suddenly success in the Ranji league will be all-important, as it should be. The league will be more competitive and older players will not lose heart. And younger players will not become so impatient because they know that there is no way to make it to the team in less than 4 seasons. The benefits of such a strategy would be enormous.

But here is the rub: the credit for these benefits would go to the next board president. Maybe that’s why the board always seems so keen to pick the raw fruit.