Dhoni will be aware that the series against the WI is one of the most important in his captaincy career

Now that T20 WC is done and dusted, it’s time for India to fly down to the Caribbean for a 4 match ODI series. The team announced is sans Sachin, Sehwag, Zaheer and Pathan and is quite an inexperienced one. Ashish Nehra gets a call back to the Indian team due to his fine performances in the IPL and Abhishek Nayyar is the only new face in the squad.

The Indian team will directly fly over to the WI from London on the 21st. It will be a different experience for Dhoni who has hardly put a foot wrong during his tenure as a captain of the national side. The failure in the T20 WC is going to hurt for sure but calls to drop him is little premature I think. Dhoni is an excellent leader and India is still the third best team in 50 over and Test formats.

Even though the team is less on confidence we should beat the WI even with this depleted team. The bowling will be spearheaded by Ishant and Harbajan and the batting by Dhoni and Yuvi. Ghambir I guess will do fine in the 50 over format as he was in reasonable form in the T20 WC. Rohit Sharma also will be a key player in the team.

Dropping Irfan Pathan was a bad decision I feel as he is the only other player to have toured WI before. Nehra has been there too and so has Harbajan, so the Indian bowling will do fine but it’s the batting which will be a major worry for the Indians. Irfan could have solved that issue coming in at no 7 as he is a very good bat and a decent bowler at the start. In the absence of Zaheer, he would have been a good bowler to have in the squad.

I hope that the experiment with Rohit opening the bat will end after the T20 WC and someone like Vijay can join Ghambir at the top. Rohit can come at number 4 and Raina can bat at number 3. The Indian captain though would want to come back to his aggressive best. It will be a test of character for the Indian captain as this will show how well he can handle the pressure.

Winning this series will be of utmost importance for the team as this will also propel us closer to the top spot in the ODI rankings. In a way it’s a good thing that India isn’t flying back home after the T20 debacle but on the flip side, watching the other teams battling for the title cannot be good either. Anyways this series will be an important one for the Indians and I hope that we win.

The team has been great over the past one year or so and I hope that we bounce back the same way we did after the 2007 WC.