(PTI Photo)

JOHANNESBURG: From Nov 11 to Dec 24, 2017, the Indian team hosted Sri Lanka for a 44-day-long tour that involved three Test matches, three ODIs and three T20Is. This series concluded three days before India were scheduled to leave for South Africa.

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The players who had only two months ago toured Sri Lanka for an equally long series nor the Indian team management were interested in these games. The BCCI still went ahead and scheduled the tour simply because there was a commitment made post confirmation that Pakistan's tour of India - scheduled during this time under the existing Future Tours Program - was not going to see the light of the day.

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The Indian team and the team management had conveyed to the BCCI that it needed to tweak the series against Sri Lanka - by either cancelling the three T20 matches or by replacing the Test series with six ODIs at best - so that the team could be free at least two weeks earlier than what turned out to be the case.

The BCCI may have given the team the offer to head early to South Africa but the latter was convinced that there was no point in one or two individuals heading there early. Those in the know of things told TOI: "The entire team wanted to travel together".

The India camp is expressing surprise at BCCI's lack of empathy towards serious requests that had been made to ensure that "inconsequential cricket" is cut down as much as possible and players are given the necessary breaks, especially ahead of long overseas tours. It is for this reason that Team India took a call on its own to rest all-rounder Hardik Pandya during the series against Sri Lanka.

The Team India camp finds it a bit of a joke that unnamed BCCI officials thought it by themselves that sending one or two players in advance could've sorted things. "What purpose does it solve to send Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane alone? A team stays together and that's what the focus was. As for the practice game, well, they (Cricket South Africa) offered us two lame tracks for the warm-up game and it made more sense to do our own thing instead of playing an odd game for the sake of it," says the Team India camp.

