All is well between MS Dhoni and Gautam Gambhir

Opening batsman Gautam Gambhir is struggling to impress the selectors but he insists that not getting the comeback call is due to reasons like “form and fitness’, clarifying that rift with skipper MS Dhoni is just a rumour and thus has nothing to do with it.

India last toured South Africa and will tour New Zealand next; however, Gambhir doesn’t seem to figure in the present or future plans of Indian selectors who have kept him out of both the tours.

But Gambhir dismissed any link-up between his omission and his relations with Dhoni, labelling it as an “imaginative mind working overtime”.

“All this friction within the team is nothing but someone’s imaginative mind working overtime,” Gambhir told Mumbai Mirror. “I have said this before and I will say this again, that there is nothing wrong between me and MS Dhoni or Viru bhai [Virender Sehwag], Yuvi [Yuvraj Singh] and Harbhajan [Singh].

“It is just a coincidence that we’re not in the team for various reasons like form and fitness but to look beyond all this is nothing but being disrespectful to the intentions of the players,” he said.

Gambhir, 32, last played a Test in December 2012 and an ODI in January 2013 but he said making a comeback is part of a sportsman’s life. “Believe me, it is no disaster. I am not the first or the last cricketer trying to make a comeback. I think apart from Sachin Tendulkar, there is not a single cricketer in the Indian team who hasn’t been left out at some stage. I’m trying to evolve as a cricketer, which is the most important thing to me.”

The Delhi batsman, who plays for the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League (IPL), also clarified that he never put club over country as was suggested when he missed the 2011 tour of West Indies due to a shoulder injury but played the IPL.

“The club vs country notion was completely fabricated. I don’t go about advertising things but I have played with enough injuries for my country. To set the record straight, let me tell you that the reports of the scans on my shoulder and groin reached us only after the game in Mumbai. Had I known how serious my injury was, I’d have definitely opted out of the IPL and looked at the opportunity of playing for India. And I am yet to come across a cricketer who prefers playing for his franchisee in the IPL rather than his country,” Gambhir said.

The left-hander also rubbished talks that losing the vice captaincy or not being promoted as captain affected his game. “Well I am not a great believer in designations. Captaincy or vice-captaincy is not the end, it’s the means to the end. The difference that I was trying to make as the vice-captain of the team, I was still doing that as member of MS Dhoni’s team. To the outside world, it might seem a catastrophe but I was certainly not losing sleep over them,” Gambhir said.