Former Indian batsman VVS Laxman picked Sourav Ganguly as the captain of his best Indian Test XI side of the past 25 years.
The former Indian captain Ganguly who, for a long time captained Laxman in the Indian team was chosen to lead by the former Hyderabad batsman ahead of names like MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Virat Kohli, who too was a part of the team.
The former hard-hitting opener Virender Sehwag was picked by Laxman to open alongside the ‘monk’ Murali Vijay. The legendary Dravid as always occupied the number three spot in the batting order.
Dravid and Laxman have had a number of game-changing partnerships and the dup were crucial to India’s success under Ganguly. The mammoth 376-run stand that they both shared against Australia at the iconic Eden Gardens in 2001 which helped India script an unlikely win will still go down as one of the best stands in Test history.
The legendary Tendulkar held the number four spot. Tendulkar has the most number of Test centuries (51) and is also the highest run-scorer in the longest format of the game. Following him in the order comes Ganguly and modern stalwarts- Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni.
Laxman, however, picked just one tweaker in his side in the form of Anil Kumble who has 619 Test scalps to his name. A mixture of youth and experience was seen in the bowling attack with the likes of Zaheer Khan, Javagal Srinath and Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
VVS Laxman’s all-time Indian Test XI: Virender Sehwag, Murali Vijay, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Sourav Ganguly (c), MS Dhoni (wk), Anil Kumble, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan