This is the part one of the first, in a four-part post. I’d pinged each of the four MPL 2013 team captains to send me, in their own words, their thoughts on why they chose the player they did, as captain for their respective squads for MPL 2014.
Additionally, the captain of each of the MPL 2014 squads have been requested to submit their reasons for retaining the players that they did, towards forming the respective ‘Three Musketeers’ of each team.
The following is what Rafeeq, the former captain of X-Men, sent in.
Rewind 2013 – MPL final, the stakes were high as much as the expectations. Each side played their best cards and the moments in the game were punctuated by terrific highs and lows. But, one player stood between Incredibles and their victory, like he wrote a script of his own.
It was temperament and belligerence coming to the fore, that took apart an in-form attack to bits. If it wasn’t enough, you’d take the match to a super-over and post 18 runs to defend.
To a certain degree, the effort restored the “spirit to fight until you prevail and impossible is nothing”. A team player, with a keen cricketing mind, Rohith would make an excellent captain for MPL 2014.
Rohith’s thoughts, on why he retained Rafeeq and Yashwanth are as follows
My first choice, retaining Yashwanth, is fairly straight forward and there wasn’t much thought process behind this. His stats in all the departments of the game speak for themselves and is the ideal man to have in the team.
My second choice required lot more thinking and sometimes to iterate, to lay the groundwork for my decision. First of all, let’s look at the candidates, excluding Yash, that could have been retained. Rafeeq, Anil, Koundi, Pritish, Anuj and GK would have made it to the list.
Looking at the list, Anil would been the obvious choice, not just because of his batting, and bowling, but also for his fielding.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t in-line with my thought process (I would say MPL format) and I wasn’t willing to let go of a bowler, the highest wicket taker last season, who holds no competition in the bowling department. One other critical factor I would say is that although Rafeeq sometimes tends to fare badly against good opposition batsmen, he is very effective against average and lower order batsmen. This might not be obvious to many others and is what I have noticed of Rafeeq over the past year and half. Lastly, new team this year meant Rafeeq will stack up the wicket columns.
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