India coach Rahul Dravid answers all 'experimenting' questions, says didn't do for sake of it

India coach Rahul Dravid gave an honest answer to the calls of 'experimenting' being done by the team in the last few series and said that they were not experimenting for the sake of it. The head coach made the comments at the end of training camp at NCA in Bengaluru as India gear up for Asia Cup 2023.

"To be very honest with you, this word experimentation gets thrown around a lot without actually sometimes being thought through," Dravid said. "It's not that we are trying to sometimes experiment for the sake of experimenting. Sometimes there are specific reasons why you have to do certain things."

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Dravid further said that the much-discussed no. 4 and 5 position players were 'fixed' about an year and half back but injuries to those players namely KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant forced them to try and rotate other players.

"Just to give you an example, the No. 4 and 5 spots seem to get discussed and talked about a lot," he continued. "It gives the impression that we don't have clarity on who was going to be there, but to be very honest with you, I could have told you 18 or 19 months ago the top two-three candidates we were looking at for the No. 4, 5 slots. It was always going to be Shreyas [Iyer], KL [Rahul] and Rishabh [Pant] for those spots, right?

"If you look back on some of the teams that we picked from 18 months ago, there was no doubt in our minds. Obviously, it's unfortunate that all three of them ended up with injuries in the space of two months. What are the odds of that happening? And I don't think we can, nobody can, calculate for that, especially with the limited number of games that we had in one-day cricket," he added.

Notably, KL Rahul and Shreyas Iyer have made a comeback to the Indian side for the Asia Cup. While Iyer has been declared fit to play, Rahul, on the other hand, has been ruled out of first two games of the regional tournament. India start their Asia Cup campaign against Pakistan on September 2 in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

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