India's avenging lot look for clean sweep; Tigers hungry

Dhaka, May 9 (UNI) With the World Cup embarrassment still fresh in the memory and the wounds yet to heal, skipper Rahul Dravid will enter Sher-e-Bangla Jatiya Stadium tomorrow for the first of the three one-day series against Bangladesh with only a clean sweep on his mind.

The idea would be to make it 2-0 over the next three days, before heading for the picturesque port city of Chittagong for the final ODI. Dravid asked his boys to 'play hard' and not underestimate the prowess of the new and improved Bangladesh squad.

The skipper made his intentions clear when he said, ''Bangladesh have improved a lot. There are no doubts about that. They are playing very good cricket. We expect stiffer challenge than what we got on our last visit here. And we are aware of it.'' ''We expect to do well here. They (Bangladesh) played really well against us in Trinidad. We have come here to play some tough cricket. We will show that we can play really well,'' he added.

India was thrashed by five wickets by Bangladesh in World Cup and he made it clear that he had no intention of seeing the same being repeated during this series.

The Wall, as he is often dubbed, quipped, ''Any international series is significant. Irrespective of what happened before we have come here to play good tough cricket and we hope to do well.'' While he made it clear that ''revenge is not on my mind as these things happen in international cricket,'' he was not going to compromise with asserting India's supremacy and prove that the World Cup wasn't anything but an aberration.

However, he has his hands full. The team is without a vice-captain and though he said yesterday that the best team will play, it will be hard for him to pick the best combination.

''We have quite a few youngsters whom we need to groom, but we will select our best team, which will hopefully win us the game,'' said Dravid.

The problem is he knows from precedence that too much tinkering with the side may boomerang as it did three years ago when Bangladesh came roaring back in Dhaka after being defeated in Chittagong.

That time Sourav Ganguly and coach John Wright had payed for the luxury of experimenting one time too many with the side.

So the question is will Dravid tread the beaten path of going with seven batsmen and four bowlers with the likes of Virender Sehwag and Dinesh Mongia or Yuvraj Singh chipping in to fulfill the fifth bowler's quota or will he go with five specialist bowlers.

The team has a new cricket manager in Ravi Shastri, bowling coach in Venkatesh Prasad and fielding coach in Robin Singh.

In fact, for the first time ever the team is traveling with a bowling and fielding coach.

The squad has a few surprises. Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly has been oficially 'rested' for the ODIs.

Youngsters in Gautam Gambhir, Robin Uthappa, Dinesh Karthik and rookies Manoj Tewari and Piyush Chawla are in and so is journeyman Dinesh Mongia who gets yet another chance to redeem himself.

Harbhajan Singh, Ajit Agarkar and Irfan Pathan have been dropped and sent back to the classrooms of domestic cricket. The mantle is now with Sreesanth, Munaf Patel and Zaheer Khan to deliver.

There are three openers in Gambhir, Uthappa and Sehwag in contention and one middle order slot would go to Dinesh Kaarthik for sure now that Manoj Tewari is out of contention at least for the first two ODIs with a shoulder injury.

Obviously the selectors don't have much faith in Sehwag and has kept a back-up ready. It will be a series when he has to turn around and show some of the blitzkrieg he is known for. The once-swashbuckler though seems to have put the best foot forward losing some good 20 pounds and practicing hard at nets.

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