BCCI must communicate plans to senior players

When a champion stumbles, you offer a comforting arm on the shoulder, not a thump on the back. It is an indicator of how you value your people.
In the jungle when the lion grows old and slow, he is left alone to be surrounded by the very animals who would hide in his presence. We are, we must be, different because grace is a human trait.
Rahul Dravid is not yet the old lion for he still has his bat, his weapon, that can keep foes away. But he has been treated like one. You could argue that he need be treated no differently from anyone else and that if he doesn't score enough runs he should be left out like anyone else. The problem with that theory is that seeks to treat proven match-winners like young hopefuls.
A Dravid or a Tendulkar or a Kumble has won you matches in the past and, when in form, will win you matches again. The organisation must seek to create an environment that gives these match-winners the best possible opportunity of regaining form.
But to leave him alone, not speak to him, not explain what the plan for him is to be petty. The plan could well be that playing two Ranji Trophy matches is a good opportunity to return to form but that plan must be communicated so that the player knows where he stands. Sadly, I suspect, there is no plan to communicate and it might well be that as a knee jerk reaction to the howls of protest against his exclusion, Dravid will be brought back. That will make everybody insecure.
This absence of a plan makes us go round and round, it creates the illusion of movement but doesn't take us too far. I am sure that, like Dravid, Sourav Ganguly has no idea of what the plan for him is either. If the perception is that Ganguly and Dravid are not pulling their weight in the side then a polite conversation and a firm decision is the way ahead.
But in order to determine whether they are, in fact, not worth a place in the side anymore we must see enough, we must know enough. With Dravid we do not know if this is a bad patch or the beginning of the end in one-day cricket.
All good teams back their players when they are down. It is easy to back a man when he is scoring runs, the strength of a unit is seen when it rallies around someone who isn't. Indian cricket needed to back Dravid, to give him confidence.
I know of a couple of teams and managers where in a quiet meeting, the struggling lead player would be guaranteed the next five games as a show of strength. But implicit in that guarantee would be a reassessment at the end of the five games. All good teams give their best players the best possible chance of success till such time as they are convinced that he can no longer succeed. They don't fool around with them with a couple of games here and one more there for it helps nobody.
You sense, like with Dravid, that there is no plan for a coach or a Test captain either. Dhoni has now been captain for a Twenty20 World Cup and for seven games against Australia. That is not a large number but I am struggling to understand how his performance in another couple of one-day games will allow anyone to make a better assessment of him as a Test captain. I suspect the decision on the Test captain has already been taken, certainly I hope it has, but keeping it secret helps no one.
Holding back information is a very poor way of showing power. I do hope though that we do not have a situation where players are interchanging roles all the time. Players need to know who the leader is.
So too with the coach where the story is starting to wear a bit thin now. We are stumbling along, taking one short term decision after another and finding justification for doing so. Either we say we don't need a coach and that we will accept the results as they come. Or we say we want a coach, the best in the circumstances, and we will try our utmost to find that person.
At the moment we are dragging our heels and suggesting that we are not really bothered either way. Do you, like me, hope that is not true but secretly believe it is?