Srikkanth says pick Sehwag. But should he be saying that?

Kris Srikkanth’s tenure as the chairman of the senior selection committee has ended but his gaffe’s show no sign of ceasing.

As the entire country wonders about whether Virender Sehwag will play in the match against Pakistan tonight, Srikkanth decided that he will do a great service to the team by airing his views on the CNN-IBN TV channel.

His message to the team was simple: Drop Chawla, play Sehwag. Don’t drop Yuvraj, he is a match winner.

As a former cricketer, he is well within his rights to comment on the team. But as a selector, someone who picked the team, should Srikkanth even be giving comments about this team?

Shouldn’t he at least wait till the end of the World T20 tournament before jumping into the television bandwagon? This is the same team that he selected – if he was even a wee bit professional, he would have abstained from the discussion.

All he needed to say was that since he had selected the team himself, it would not be right for him to comment on it. On one hand, the Board of Control for Cricket in India keeps talking about going professional and on the other hand, we have Srikkanth doing this. Is he angling for another stint as an expert?

What is the message that this sends across? There is something known as a cooling off period but obviously Srikkanth isn’t aware of the term. In simple terms, it means that the information that Srikkanth had in his capacity as chairman of the selection committee, cannot and should not be brought out in the public domain; it should not even be used by him in his columns or as an expert on television.

A few months back, a parliamentary panel has asked the government to impose a five-year cooling-off period for senior officers against the current norm of one year. The reasoning was that some retired military officers ‘act as middlemen’ for defence procurements.

Now, Srikkanth is not acting as a middleman. But he has once again managed to define the term unprofessional. The new batch of selectors led by Sandeep Patil will do well not to emulate the deeds of their predecessor.

And to ask the BCCI to take note of this and censure Srikkanth is too much to ask as well. They didn’t say anything to him during him tenure as selector and they won’t say anything now either.