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terrific trio: Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar seen before leaving for the World Cup in the West Indies

THE triumvirate of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly has been the backbone of the Indian batting for more than a decade now. Yesterday, the selectors announced the 30-man probables for the Twenty20 World Cup and the trio opted out. National selection committee chief Dilip Vengsarkar said Dravid called him from Hove to inform that the three senior players were opting out. “I got a call from Rahul this morning who said on behalf of all the three players that they were opting out of the Twenty20 World Cup,” Vengsarkar said on Saturday. Chance for youth Asked why the trio backed out, Vengsarkar said, “I think they wanted to give a chance to youngsters”. However, their decision to opt out of the inaugural Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa in September may leave some surprised, while others would feel that the hustling nature of the shortest version of the game is suited to youngsters only and they did the appropriate thing by opting out. Twenty20 is all about big hitting, electric fielding and scampering between wickets. Looking at it objectively, Dravid and Ganguly probably did not fit in the scheme of things. Tendulkar, who has been batting like the ‘Tendulkar of old’ for the past few matches, is probably the only one who could have commanded a place. His bowling would have been handy too. Tendulkar, who played few domestic Twenty20 matches for Mumbai last season performed quite well, averaging almost 40 with a healthy strike rate of 166.38. Praveen Amre, who was Mumbai’s coach said: “Sachin enjoyed playing Twenty20 a lot. We were playing in extreme conditions in Ahmedabad and he always gave us good starts.” Gruelling schedule Amre felt that the gruelling schedule in the coming season could have caused Tendulkar to opt out. However, he did not feel it’s the beginning of the end of the Sachin-Sourav-Dravid era. “Nowadays, the season is almost 365 days long. It is not possible for a player to play all the matches. “As far it being the end of an era, I think the trio will play for a few more years,” said Amre. However, it remains to be seen if the three batting giants follow suit in the ODIs because it is most likely that they won’t be available for the 2011 World Cup and if Twenty20 is a young man’s game, so is one-day cricket.  Probables: Robin Uthappa, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Mohammad Kaif, Dinesh Karthik, Rohit Sharma, Gautam Gambhir, Yousuf Pathan, Suresh Raina, Manoj Tiwary, Neeraj Patel, Karan Goel, Cheteshwar Pujara, Abhishek Jhunjhunwala, Rudra Pratap Singh, Ishant Sharma, Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan, Ajit Agarkar, S Sreesanth, Munaf Patel, Joginder Sharma, Piyush Chawla, Harbhajan Singh, Ramesh Powar, Rajesh Pawar, Niranjan Behera, S Anirudha, Praveen Kumar.