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The Royal Indian Cricket Team

Details of its past and present

he Indian cricket team is the national cricket team of India. Governed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), it is a full member of the International Cricket Council (ICC) with Test and One Day International (ODI) status.

Current Position of the Team

The Indian cricket team is currently ranked third by the ICC in Tests, third in ODIs and sixth in T20s. On 2 April 2011, the team won the 2011 Cricket World Cup, its second after 1983 . It thus became only the third team after West Indies and Australia to have won the World Cup more than once. It is also the first cricket team to win world cup on home soil. In both Tests and ODIs, win-loss ratio of recent years is much higher than that of older periods, when it was a weaker team. Currently Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the captain in all forms of the game while Duncan Fletcher is the coach. Under the leadership of Dhoni, the Indian team has set a national record for most back-to-back ODI wins (9 straight wins) and has emerged as one of the most formidable teams in international cricket.

Previous History of the Team:

Although cricket was introduced to India by European merchant sailors in the 18th-century and the first cricket club in India was established in Calcutta in 1972, India's national cricket team did not play their first Test match until . They became the sixth team to be granted Test cricket status. In their first fifty years of international cricket, India proved weaker than Australia and England, winning only 35 of the 196 test matches. The team, however, gained strength near the end of the 1970s with the emergence of players such as Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and the Indian spin quartetErapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkataraghavan (both off spinners), Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (a leg spinner), and Bishen Singh Bedi (a left-arm spinner). Traditionally much stronger at home than abroad, the Indian team has improved its overseas form since the start of the 21st century. It won the Cricket World Cup in 1983 under KAPIL DEV, was runners-up in 2003 under SOURAVGANGULY, and won the World Cup a second time in 2011 under MAHENDHAR SI NGH DHONI.

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India has also been the Runners-up in 2000 ICC KnockOut Trophy, and the Joint Champions along with Sri Lanka in 2002 ICC Champions Trophy led by SOURAV GANGULY in both the instances. India also won the inaugural World Twenty20 under MAHENDRA SINGH DHONI in 2007. The current team contains many of the world's leading players, including who hold numerous cricketing world records.

Selection Committee for Indian Cricket Team:

Selection for the Indian cricket team occurs through the BCCI's zonal selection policy, where each of the five zones is represented with one selector and one of the members nominated by BCCI as the Chairman of the Selection Committee. This has sometimes led to controversy as to whether these selectors are biased towards their zones. The current chairman of Selection Committee is Krishnamachari Srikkanth. Yashpal Sharma, Narendra Hirwani, Surendra Bhave and Raja Venkat are the other members of the selection committee whose terms started in September 2008 with BCCI holding the rights for a one-year extension.

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