At the end of what was to be a routine press conference, Niranjan Shah most casually made a very significant statement. "(Sourav) Ganguly has been dropped for today’s game, not rested,” the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary said on Friday afternoon, midway through the third India-Australia one-dayer at the Rajiv Gandhi International stadium.

For a long minute, there was stunned silence in the press box. Then, all hell broke loose as journalists jostled with one another to grill Shah on why the former Indian captain was left out of the playing eleven.

Hamstring strain
The general assumption till that point had been that the 35-year-old hadn’t totally shaken off the effects of the right hamstring strain sustained in Bangalore on Saturday night. Shah, however, repeatedly stressed that Ganguly was not ‘rested’ but indeed dropped. And all this of his own accord, without anyone even raising the Ganguly issue!

Shah had only wended his way to the press box to announce the Indian team for the fourth and fifth one-dayers, as well as the Twenty20 international against the Aussies, later this month. On his way out, he nonchalantly dropped the bombshell.

Repeatedly questioned about why the Kolkatan had been left out, all he had to say was, “How can I say why he was dropped? Maybe he didn’t fit into the composition of the team.”

India chose to blood 20-year-old Rohit Sharma at the expense of Ganguly after reverting to the seven-batsman formula.

While the merit behind that call can be argued, if not questioned, why Ganguly then continued to merit a place in the fifteen for the next two games is most certainly intriguing. It was a question to which Shah had no answer, just as on the field, the Indians had few answers to the numerous demanding questions the Aussies asked of them.