The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : Good all-round combination, says Dravid

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Good all-round combination, says Dravid

Bangalore: Rahul Dravid, the skipper of Bangalore’s Royal Challengers in the Indian Premier League, stressed that his squad had the players to compete with other teams.

“We have a good all-round combination of players, who lend some good balance to the side. I think we will be very competitive in the league. I know some people are saying we don’t have star value or quality but we certainly think we have got the stars be it Jacques Kallis or Mark Boucher, Shivnarine Chanderpaul or Nathan Bracken or Dale Steyn.

Exciting combination

“We got exactly the kind of players we wanted and we are very excited about that. Even in terms of Indian players you can’t have tougher players than Anil Kumble, Zaheer Khan and Wasim Jaffer,” Dravid said here on Friday.

Dravid also mentioned about missing out on local lad Robin Uthappa in the auction. “We would have loved to have Robin in our side but the rules of the bidding were such that it was not easy to have all the players that you wanted to have. If you look at every team not all of them were able to get players from their catchment areas,” Dravid said.

Crowe roped in

Meanwhile, the Bangalore outfit’s CEO Charu Sharma said that former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe and India’s bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad will be part of the resource personnel.

“Martin Crowe will be our chief strategist and Venkatesh Prasad will also be there. And apart from the players we bid successfully for, we have got some players from our catchment areas as well.

“We needed a top-quality opener and we have opted for J. Arun Kumar, very much a Bangalorean who now plays for Goa.

We have seamer R. Vinay Kumar who can bat a bit. B Akhil, who is an all-rounder and we are also looking at players like Bharat Chipli, Devraj Patil, Manish Pandey, Sourav Tiwari and K.P. Appanna,” Charu Sharma said.— Principal Correspondent

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