“You see, not all national teams at the senior level have a 14 or 15-year-old in their squad. After many decades, we have someone like Vaibhav Sooryavanshi,” Saikia told PTI. “At one point in time, it was Sachin Tendulkar who made it to the national team at such a young age. When such a young kid is part of the senior team, there are obviously a lot of issues that can crop up.
“Therefore, to make him comfortable and help him get used to an adult environment, where all the other players are above 18 years of age, and the team management members are also adults, we felt it would be helpful.
“We are doing this because we believe it will ease a lot of issues as far as Vaibhav is concerned.”
While no official sanctions have been announced for any code of conduct breaches, the A-team tri-series falls within the jurisdiction of the host board – Sri Lanka Cricket – and not the ICC or BCCI. Saikia dismissed the notion of the BCCI taking any action.
“A lot of things are going on in the social media that BCCI is contemplating action, etc. Do you want BCCI to step into the domain of match referee?” Saikia said. “The BCCI is not an authority, we should not intrude into the area where the match referee and the umpires are the main persons who can take any decision regarding any incident that had happened in the playground.
“Whatever had happened, it was a part of the game, and the BCCI have no role to play. The role is of the match referee. If anything is going wrong, he will take a call, the umpires will take a call, and there is a system in place.”
Sooryavanshi has so far scored only 117 runs with a high score of 44 in four innings in the tri-series , but those runs have come at a strike rate of 153.94. India A have qualified for the final in Dambulla on June 21.
