Former Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh said that the lack of good batsmen in the middle order is one of the key reasons why India have struggled a lot in ICC events.
Yuvraj Singh, who won the Player of the Tournament award in the 2011 World Cup, said that when Team India won the World Cup, every player had a set number to bat on, which was not the case in the most recent Cricket World Cup 2019.
Yuvraj said that not giving continuous opportunities to the players in the 2019 World Cup proved to be wrong for the team. The team had Vijay Shankar at number 4, who had played only 5-7 matches at that time. Then he was replaced in the team by Rishabh Pant, who had played only 4 ODIs at that time.
He said that according to him, Ambati Rayudu should have been included in the team instead of these two players. He added that by the time India played the 2003 World Cup, him, Mohammad Kaif, Dinesh Mongia had played almost 50 ODIs.
Yuvraj said that, this is the common problem for Team India in T20 cricket as well. He said that all the players should be informed about their batting position in advance and not to change it too much. We also lost the recent T20 World Cup because of the same reason.
During an interaction on Sports18’s Home of Heroes event, Yuvraj Singh said, T20 and T10 is the future of cricket and that Test cricket is dying as people want to watch T20 cricket and players too want to play T20 cricket.
He added that why would anyone want to play five-day cricket for five lakhs as today players earn 50 lakhs by playing T20 cricket. He continued that players who have not made it to international cricket are also getting Rs 7-10 crore.
“Why would someone play five-day cricket and get five lakh rupees and today play T20 cricket and get 50 lakh?” said Yuvraj.
Yuvraj Singh further said that after watching a T20 match and then when you watch a 50-over match, it starts to look like a test match now.