Karun Nair and Murali Vijay had expressed their disappointment over selectors’ lack of communication following their ouster from the Indian team. While chairman of selectors MSK Prasad has denied the claims, it has been reported that Indian team management is furious over the whole matter.  

Prasad has said that after Nair, Vijay and Shikhar Dhawan were dropped from the Test series against West Indies, the selectors had communicated with the axed cricketers.

However, the two batsmen stated otherwise, adding uncertainty to the matter and leaving the management unhappy over the whole confusion. 

According to the Times of India, no meeting took place between the selectors and these players and nothing was done from the CoA’s end to resolve it either.

“Someone is clearly not telling the truth here. Now, either it’s the players or it’s the selectors. If they (BCCI/CoA) want to understand this better, why not just make the captain, coach, the senior cricketers and selectors sit across the table and hear them out? It’ll be immediately clear who is lying and who is not,” TOI report quoted sources as saying.

After Vijay’s statement that he did not get informed about being dropped, Prasad had said that he and his colleague Devang Gandhi had informed the opener about the reasons behind his exclusion. Another another BCCI official, on condition of anonymity, has also said that Vijay had not given the full picture of his story.

“All these are baseless reports,” Prasad had said last week. “With regard to the non-communication with Murali Vijay after dropping him, I am equally surprised why he has said this while my colleague and selector on call Devang Gandhi had clearly informed him about the reasons why he was dropped.”

The TOI report claims that not only has there was no communication between the players and the selectors, nothing was been done to resolve the confusion. Besides Vijay and Nair, Rohit Sharma, who was expected to play the England Tests, wasn’t been contacted either.

Despite the selectors’ repeated claims that the players were contacted, the belief is that at no point was it considered a priority. 

“It took a Mayank Agarwal forever to find a place in the Test squad despite all the scoring he did in the domestic circuit. But all that the selector is bothered with is in conveying that cricketers are being communicated with. That’s not the case,” the sources added.

It has also been learnt by the daily that the BCCI has not sent notices to any of these cricketers for sharing their thoughts with the media, but confrontation regarding the same might happen soon.

“Vijay and Karun didn’t exactly do the right thing by speaking on selection policy. That is a breach of central contract. As per the central contract, no player can speak about a just-concluded tour for 30 days. There is a COA (Committee of Administrators) meeting in Hyderabad on October 11 and this issue will be raised there,” a senior BCCI official had said.