MUMBAI: The scorecard of India’s first match (and second of the on-going tri-series) against West Indies on Sunday shows Team India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni as designated wicketkeeper though the fact was that he could not come on field owing to the hamstring injury while India batting first.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/tri-nation-west-indies-2013/engine/match/597924.html
According to India’s noted statistician, Rajneesh Gupta, Dinesh Karthick, and not Dhoni should have been credited here.
Speaking exclusively, he says, “Ideally the person who actually donned the gloves should be credited as the wicketkeeper. I personally feel that if a player keeps wickets for the entire duration of the innings, he should be acknowledged as the keeper. If he does this for only some overs, then the designated keeper should get the credit, with a footnote mentioning about the incident”.
Explaining more about the procedure, he add, “the team lists the captains exchange at the toss clearly indicate as to who is captain and wicket-keeper for the match. Cricinfo, Wisden and other sources record the official captain and wicketkeeper as declared at the start of the game, and changes caused by injury etc are noted in the text / footnotes”.
“However, while there is a requirement in the laws that the umpires must be informed who the captain is before the toss, there is nothing in the laws which says the wicketkeeper has to be named in advance of actually taking the field. So, it should not matter much who was the designated wicketkeeper at the time of the toss. I have seen many team sheets which did not contain any information about the keeper”.
“The things might get complicated. What if, the regular wicketkeeper kept wickets for half the duration of the innings and then someone else took over for the remaining half? What if, two players swap the role regularly during the course of an innings (this is legitimate!).There is no way you can show that in a scorecard”, he fears.