List of players who played in last year’s edition and are missing out this year : Shikar Dhawan, Sridharan Sriram, Sunny Singh, Satyajit Parab, Ranadeb Bose, Amit Bhandari, Ravi Kant Shukla, Sreekumar Nair, Neeraj Patel, Dheeraj Jadhav, Shahbaz Nadeem, Manoj Tiwari, J P Yadav, Vidyut Sivaramakrishnan, Yousuf Pathan.

Around this time last year, Jai Prakash Yadav was part of the Indian dressing room. Less than a year later, he finds himself out of the list of top 39 ODI cricketers in the nation. He is 32 and honestly, I really don’t see him being able to make a comeback from here. I feel the same about Sriram too. He is 30 and he has signed up to play for Maharashtra this year, but I doubt the transfer of address from Chennai to Pune would really help his international prospects in any way.

Greens: Mohammad Kaif (capt), Sourav Ganguly, VVS Laxman, Hemang Badani, Suresh Raina, Tanmay Srivastav, Piyush Chawla, Parthiv Patel, Ashish Nehra, L Balaji, Praveen Kumar, Reetinder Sodhi, Saurasish Lahiri. Coach: Lalchand Rajput

Last year’s “Kingfisher India B” is this year’s India Green. Mohammad Kaif has been given the opportunity to lead the most interesting of all the three squads in the tournament. The team has 6 players who have captained India at various age-levels - 16 year old Tanmaya Srivastava (led the under-19 team which won both the test and ODI series against England in England earlier this year), 17 year old Piyush Chawla (led the under-19 team which recently whitewashed the neighbors across the border in both tests and ODIs), Parthiv Patel (led the under-19 team in the junior world cup 2002), Reetinder Sodhi (led the team which won the under-15 world cup in 1996), Mohammad Kaif (led the team which won the under-19 world cup in 2000) and Sourav Ganguly (the most successful skipper in the history of Indian test cricket). Add VVS Laxman (who has led Hyderabad), Badani (who has led Tamil Nadu) and Raina (who is currently leading UP against Sialkot) to the list and you get a team full of leaders.

Reds: Venugopal Rao (capt), Gautham Gambhir, Robin Uthappa, S Badrinath, Rohit Sharma, Tejinder Pal Singh, Dinesh Karthik (wk), VRV Singh, Sreesanth, Ramesh Powar, Zaheer Khan, Murali Kartik, C Raghu. Coach: Robin Singh

It was called “Alchemist India A” (the players were all following their dreams, but the name had nothing to do with Paul Coelho’s book) last year. The selectors obviously see some real potential in Venugopal Rao’s leadership skills, for he has been the India A captain for a while now. He lost the middle order fringe spot in the national squad to Dinesh Mongia and the fact that Mongia did well in Malaysia would be playing on his mind.

Blues: Rahul Dravid (capt), Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, Dinesh Mongia, Wasim Jaffer, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Irfan Pathan, Harbhajan Singh, Ajit Agarkar, Munaf Patel, Rudra Pratap Singh, Ravindra Jadeja. Coach: Ian Frazer

Last year, the team was called the “Airtel India Seniors”. Dravid and Sehwag were away playing the farcical Super Series in Australia. Ganguly was supposed to captain, but he pulled out at the last minute and Kaif did the honours.

Kid: “Ma, I scored 100 in cricket today”
Mom: “Great, You could be like Ponting one day. Who were you playing against?”
Kid: “Playing.. No ma.. I scored 100 out of 100 in the cricket exam”
Mom: “Oh great.. You could be like that cricket blogger at Willow and Leather one day”

Amused? Read this.

Courtesy: The Australian

Cricket Australia unveiled yesterday a cricket-based educational package that has been offered to every school in the country and aims to improve children’s geographical, mathematical, language and history skills. At the same time, it aims to promote the game.