In an interview with Cricbuzz, former Indian Opener, Virendra Sehwag in a contrasting manner criticized the need to pass fitness test to play and even went on to say, if Indian team had this types of test in their era, likes of Dravid, Laxman wouldn’t have made it to playing XI
He told Cricbuzz, “I won’t agree with all of this, if these criteria existed before, Tendulkar, Laxman, and Ganguly wouldn’t have passed it. During my time, we had such a test, where they always fell short of the 12.5 mark.”
Sehwag considers skill as the most important thing of all. He continued, “Skill is important, today if you are playing a fit team but don’t have the skills, then you would ultimately end up losing. Play them based on their skills, slowly you can improve their fitness over time but if is yo-yo criteria is applied straight away, then the talks are different. If a player can field and bowl 10 overs, that should be enough, we shouldn’t be concerned about the other things”.
He wasn’t particularly happy about not selecting Ashwin and Varun Chakravarthy, just because they weren’t able to clear the YO-YO test. “I want to tell you one thing, here we are talking about yo-yo Test, Hardik Pandya doesn’t have issues with running, he has issues with workload because of his bowling. However, Ashwin and (Varun) Chakravarthy, on the other hand, haven’t cleared the yo-yo Test, that’s why they aren’t here” Sehwag said.
