Former India all-rounder Balvinder Singh Sandhu has blamed the Mumbai Indians for the captaincy chaos involving Hardik Pandya, Rohit Sharma and the players. With every game, the public backlash towards Mumbai Indians and more specifically, their captain, Hardik Pandya is growing. With three defeats from three matches, this is not the kind of start they newly-appointed captain or the franchise must have hoped. Not only are they languishing at the bottom of the points table yet to open their account, the jeering and booing of the crowd isn’t doing the team any good either. At the centre of the storm is Hardik, who Balvinder Singh Sandhu feels, has got caught up in this tangle through no fault of his own. The former India World Cup winning all-rounder has in fact blamed MI’s management as a whole for getting carried away with the Hardik wave as he returned to the franchise after a gap of two years. Removing Rohit Sharma, who has a proven captaincy record with five IPL title wins, and replacing him with Hardik right away is a decision the franchise should have thought through, reckoned Sandhu. He also raised questions at the management for not being able to convince the owners otherwise. “One would expect that such a pivotal decision as changing the captain would have been thoroughly deliberated upon by the owners in consultation with the professionally employed think tank of the Mumbai Indians. However, it appears that the professionals involved may have simply gone with the flow to appease the owners, rather than having the courage to provide them candid and forthright assessments,” Sandhu wrote in his column for the Mid-Day.
