Well as usual the Meeting was boring. They discussed and discussed and what did they come up with: Greg cannot go completely. Need Younger Players. Create a pool of 25-30 (what do you mean…this never happened?). Get Shastri. Cut Ads!

It was fun. Basically by advising to the players to cut down on number of ads, BCCI is only accepting that ads cause a rift between personalities. And what more, BCCI adds more personalities - Ravi Shastri. Ravi Shastri is an interesting gentleman. (I’ve never known if he is married.) He brings lot of passion, attitude, style, tactics and straightforwardness. That means he is going to be helpful, but ditto like Greg Chappel will call a spade a spade, but hopefully in an Indian manner.

But who knows, he still hasn’t accepted the job. Yeah of course, Sunil Gavaskar has quite nicely opted out of the job, though he still likes to ask why Indian cricketer’s fail!

All in all…nothing much was done. Except these:

The BCCI had asked cricketers not to do more than three ads every year, and cut down match fee from 1.6lakhs to 1 lakh. The bonus after winning a series will of course be very high. However, BCCI didn’t comment on how they are going to improve the infrastructure.

A new bowling coach, Venkatesh Prasad is appointed. As far as I know, Venkatesh Prasad was only good with his leg-cutters. Otherwise he was no better than Ajit Agarkar.

A fielding coach, Robin Singh, is also gonna be in the dressing room as a fielding coach when India will take on Bangladesh next month.
Though one can understand that no big difference will be seen soon after Venky and Robin join the team. Ravi Shastri’s inclusion comes only as a half-measure. More than being the coach of the team, he will have a closer and a real look into how the senior players behave. And by the way Greg had talked about Saurav and Sachin, it goes onto show that they are going to be in the side next month. (If they are as great as they are made to be, Sachin and Saurav need not take this trip to Bangladesh, and if they are not that great, then why keep them in the team?)

So I won’t be surprised if the team to Bangladesh is no different from the team that returned from World Cup-2007, minus Anil Kumble who will be replaced by Romesh Powar.