Former India captain Sourav Ganguly said on Friday he was hurt at his continued exclusion from the team and insisted he was good enough to play international cricket.
“It hurts, it does hurt to be out of the team,” the 34-year-old said in a television interview as the selectors prepared to pick the Champions Trophy squad on Sunday.
“I still feel I am good enough and that’s the way it is. There must be something wrong which has kept me out.”
Ganguly, India’s most successful Test captain with 21 wins, was sacked from the top job in October and later eased out of both the Test and one-day squad following a row with coach Greg Chappell.
Chappell, the former Australian captain and batting great, described Ganguly as a “disruptive influence” in an e-mail to the Indian cricket board last September which was leaked to the media.
Ganguly, who has not played international cricket since February, has been included in the preliminary 30-man squad for the Champions Trophy to be played in India in October-November.
But the left-hander’s inclusion in the final 14 is unlikely despite being only the fourth batsman to score over 10,000 one-day runs after team-mate Sachin Tendulkar, Pakistan’s Inzamam-ul Haq and Sri Lanka’s Sanath Jayasuriya.
Ganguly, however, refused to directly blame Chappell for his omission.
“It is difficult for me to pinpoint any particular reason but the bottom line is that I am out of the team for whatever reasons and that’s what matters,” he told the CNN-IBN news channel.
“I have just played two games in the last 12 months for India.
“Obviously when I am not a part of the team, somebody does not want you to be in the team and that could be anybody.
“It is very difficult to pinpoint any particular person because there are a whole lot of people involved in team selection.
“The captain, coach, selectors, everybody is involved so its is very difficult to pinpoint any particular person.”
Chairman of selectors Kiran More has stressed India was looking to build for the future but Ganguly, who has 10,123 runs from 279 one-dayers, still nurses hopes of playing in his third World Cup next year.
If he is excluded from the Champions Trophy squad, Ganguly will have to score heavily in domestic cricket to force his way back in the team for the tour of South Africa in December.
The World Cup will be held in the Caribbean in March-April.