World Cup winning former Indian skipper Kapil Dev has recently cleared his stance in the raging debate over whether the national cricket team should go for split captaincy. Ever since Mumbai Indians won its fifth Indian Premier League (IPL) title under Rohit Sharma, there are quite a few people in the Indian Cricket fraternity, which includes fans and some former players, have vouched in favour of giving away the white-ball captaincy to Rohit replacing Virat Kohli, who currently leads the country in all three formats.
However, Kapil Dev feels the concept of split captaincy doesn’t work in the Indian Cricket culture.
“In our culture it is not going to happen that way. In one company you make two CEOs? No. If Kohli is going to play T20s and he is good enough, let him be there. Even though I would like to see other people coming out. But it’s difficult,” said Kapil at the HT Leadership Summit which was held virtually.
“Our 80 per cent, 70 per cent of the team across formats is same team. They don’t like captains having different theory. It may bring more differences between the players who look up to the captain.
“If you have two captains, players might think he is going to be my captain in Tests. I will not annoy him.”
Interestingly, in the recent past (From the 2014-15 tour of Australia till January 2017) Indian Cricket had witnessed split captaincy when MS Dhoni used to lead the white-ball sides whereas Kohli was in-charge of the Test team. During this timeframe the Indian team enjoyed a lot of success across formats.