Sunil Gavaskar on India's flop at Asia Cup: 'Stop experiments' and 'workload management' talks

New Delhi: Former India captain Sunil Gavaskar believes India’s dismal showing in the Super Four of the Asia Cup is a result of the first choice playing XI not getting into sync.

On Tuesday, India lost to Sri Lanka by six wickets with a ball to spare. With two consecutive defeats, India’s fate of reaching the continental tournament’s final is not entirely in their hands.

Explained | How India can still qualify for the Asia Cup final

With things looking bleak, Gavaskar urged the Indian setup to stop the personnel experiments and conversations around workload management – especially in a year with the T20 World Cup.

“It has not come about (sync) because you haven’t had the same team playing. You get into a sync when the whole team is playing. You try to experiment, there is nothing wrong with that. There are always 3 or 4 places up for grabs in a team and in the process of trying to identify those players, you try to go in with different teams. What that did was obviously, you know, when other players come back into the team, the sync will take a longer time,” Gavaskar said on India Today.

India have been trying to iron out their combination with T20 World Cup in October and November in Australia. Some of the most prominent recent changes include the absence of Virat Kohli and Jasprit Bumrah from the bilateral assignments in West Indies and Zimbabwe.

Most of the major first-choice players were rested for the long journey to Zimbabwe – including skipper Rohit Sharma.

But Men in Blue have an opportunity to get their house in order when Australia and South Africa travel for T20I matches from 20 September until 4 October.

“I would have thought that prior to the Asia Cup, the tour of Zimbabwe was the one where the majority of the players who were going to play the Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup should have been selected. Now, suddenly, you have got 4-5 guys coming in, guys who had done well in Zimbabwe are not in the XI, not even in the squad. So the sync will take time to come,” Gavaskar added.

“Yes, there is a touch of worry. I am not overly worried, because we have got a few matches coming up at home before the T20 World Cup. There, I hope, no experiments will take place.

“You’ll pick the squad that is going to go to Australia and play. Stop talking about workload and all that, when you are playing for India, there’s no workload. You just got to get your best team out in the park for the coming matches in India.

“Now with the exit from the Asia Cup, you have got 2-3 days of extra rest. You take that rest and start getting together in Mohali for the Australia series.

The same team plus one or two standbys for the series against South Africa and Australia. That will then give them a lot more time out in the middle. We always keep talking about time in the middle, we talk about overs under the belt, we haven’t had that,” he added.

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