IPL: Of captains and owners

It’s just one match. It’s probably too early to say it, but I will say it. The team that won today belonged to India’s greatest war-time general. Shah Rukh Khan owns Kolkata Knight Riders, true. But once they step on to the field, the team belongs to the captain. Shashank Manohar or Sharad Pawar never own team India, it is Dhoni’s team. The Australian team is Ponting’s team, not ACB’s. The team that won today, belonged to Sourav Ganguly.


Does this mean that there is no meaning to what Dav Whatmore and Wasim Akram would have done? It’d be incorrect to say so. But what ultimately matters is what the men do on the field, when there is no second chance. That performance is driven by the captain.

Rewind by a year. South Africa, IPL-2. Shah Rukh Khan thought John Buchanan was the guy who’d lead KKR to victory. The natural leader of the team was Ganguly. SRK had no guts to be forthright and say that he wanted to sack Ganguly. They came up with silly things like 4 captains for the tournament, and then the captaincy was taken away in a very wrong way. Yes, it is the owner’s prerogative as to who the captain should be and who should be given the sack. But things need to be done with dignity and as a man.

I saw KKR lose matches that they should have won. McCullum as a remote-control leader was uninspiring. The real leadership resided with Buchanan, who was sitting in the dugout. Players can’t look beyond the boundary line for leadership, they need to see it on the field. Coming to this match, now.

KKR looked like they’d lose this match, quite a few times. But the difference was that this year they came back from the brink and won a match they should have lost. The difference was probably in the leadership. Probably Whatmore and Ganguly have an arrangement that beyond the boundary line, Whatmore is the leader and when they step on to the field, Ganguly is. I saw the man make 3 bowling changes, and all of them produced wickets. I saw a charged-up team. It’s just one match, but I saw a change.

I don’t know if they can make it to the semis this year. That’d mean that they have played most of their matches well, leading up to the knock-out, and then they can hope for 2 good games. KKR finished last in the previous edition of the IPL, and that had nothing to do with the then captain. The owner screwed things up. This time, SRK has left his team in his captain’s hands. If KKR does better, it is because of Ganguly. If they don’t then the captain should take the flak.

And the self-proclaimed No.1 should realise that in a cricket match the heroes are the ones who are sweating it out on the field. Not the ones beyond the boundary line. Team sport is different. It is not like a film or a soft drink, for which you select a team to make a good product. In a team sport, the team is the product.


P.S. On 24th April, nothing would please me more than seeing Sachin Tendulkar lift the trophy on his 37th birthday. He represents the city that is my home. If not him, then it should be Sourav Ganguly. After all, he is the best person to have led my country in cricket

The soap opera of appointments and rejections in Indian Cricket

When the news of Anil Kumble being appointed captain came in, it seemed like this old warrior has been given his due and has been given it very late in his career. There are two things that make one a little uneasy about this decision; firstly, that he has been given the job for three tests only against Pakistan and, secondly, Kumble was given this responsibility only after Sachin Tendulkar refused.

It is never easy to produce miracles in 3 matches. The last thing a national team needs is instability at the top. India does not have a coach and if one does not know who will captain the team against the best team in the world, it does not augur well for a national team. Yes, there have been reports, and Kumble has himself said in an interview that he thinks that he is not a stop-gap captain, but the plain fact is that Anil Kumble has been appointed for 3 test matches only. One does not know if Jumbo has been informally told that the appointment is till the Springboks visit India, but if he has been(that is what some media reports claim) why couldn’t the selectors and the board make it official that he is the skipper for three full series and not just three tests?

Very few things that the selectors and the board have done have been right. I just simply cannot understand these short term announcements. Appoint teams for 2 games, appoint captains for 3 tests or one series. It would be a jolly good idea to appoint selectors for 2 games and based on the performance of the selected players the selectors’ would be retained. I know that it is a preposterous idea, but that is the very same theory that the selectors seem to be following as far as team selection goes. And I do not understand why the selectors give in to media rhetoric.

Each and every time the team is about to be selected, and that is almost thrice a month these days, one wonders about what would the future of the senior batsmen be. But our batting does not seem to be the problem and certainly not the three seniors that have been targeted, but the bowlers. To elucidate, if one were to look at the Australia series and this series against Pakistan, whenever India has bowled 50 overs, they have conceded runs at the rate of 8.83 in the last 10 overs. That has usually been the difference in winning and losing. If the opposing team scores close to ninety runs in the last ten, it leaves the batsmen with a mountain to climb while chasing or it becomes extremely difficult to defend what the batsmen have put up.

Does this small fact not irk the selectors? Especially when we have a bowling coach? Somehow, the media is obsessed with big names. The selectors have needlessly fallen prey to the rhetoric. They have dropped Rahul Dravid needlessly just because he did not fare well against Australia (he has scored 823 runs at 37.4 in 31 ODIs in 2007). The other two batsmen that are being placed under needless scrutiny are Sachin Tendulkar (who has scored 1298 runs in 31 ODIs in 2007 at an average of 46.35) and Sourav Ganguly (who has scored 1235 runs in 31 ODIs at 45.74). The two Indian openers are numbers 2 and 3 in the highest scorers’ list in 2007. And in the top 10 run getters of 2007 there are 4 Indians and three of them in the top 4. The problem is clearly not our batting.

But then the selectors have only been giving in to rhetoric. They are trying to fix something that isn’t broken. And the thing that is mutilated is not been looked into at all. There are 3 things that need to be fixed in Indian cricket. 1) Give the captain a long rope; 2) Don’t touch the batting till the South Africa series gets over and fix the bowling quickly; 3) Get the board mandarins and the selectors to shut up and work for Indian cricket, and not try their best to give the media stories, get their faces on the tele and their columns in the papers.

Racism in cricket, replacing the oldies, being aggressive: Indian cricket has questions but no answers

The one-day series between India and Australia is throwing up more questions than answers. The problem is that the questions that have been thrown up do not seem to have answers. Let me try and list the questions down.

1) Have the Indian media and fans realized that T20 is a different form of cricket than ODIs?

2) Have the young Indian cricketers understood that aggression does not mean snarling without substance and that the definition of an aggressive cricketer is not that of one with most theatric stunts?

3) Do some people know what racist taunts are?

Let me try to answer, rather introspect, these questions. A successful team in an abbreviated form of the game’s tournament is not the panacea for what ails Indian cricket. None of the T20 stars, and I mean NOBODY, has the wherewithal to challenge the place of Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, for their places in the side. Apart from these two players, only Yuvraj Singh has scored 1,000 runs in 2007. So till some young players perform, let us stop speculating about the oldies’ future. If one were to look at recent performance, forget past records, these two cannot be touched. The ample proof came twice in this series. In the 4^th ODI India won because these 2 put up 91, and in the 6^th ODI, till these two were going it looked like India would chase down 318. On current form, there are only two match-winners for India in ODIs and both are in the autumn of their careers, if not winter.

The second question has bemused me more than other questions. Sachin Tendulkar is among the most aggressive players I have ever seen. And never have I seen him open his trap to talk needlessly to the other players. And that, despite having a record and performances to boast of. By acting like a bunch of theatrical drunks, and not backing it up with solid performances, is making the likes of S. Sreesanth look stupid. The person Sreesanth has picked on has responded in the most brilliant way. By performing. Andrew Symonds has been a joy to watch for a cricket lover. The prancing up and down idiotically only makes Sreesanth look like he is imitating a monkey.

Oops!! Oops!! Did I say ‘monkey’? Is that racism? Hell no! And that brings me down to the third point. If the crowds at Vadodra did indeed call Symonds a monkey, they were being blatantly stupid, but not racist. Either-ways, such people do not deserve to watch this noble game. But I must say, these people are neither cricket lovers, nor racists. I can say with a lot of conviction that monkey is not a racist remark in India. We, in India, worship the monkey-god Hanuman. The life-form that we worship cannot be a racist slur. This is a clear case of making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Looking at the form Symonds has had, be probably has had a divine hand that is making this wonderfully aggressive cricketer smash bowlers like seldom before. So, just lay it off. ICC, sections of the media, some of the cricketers.

India is in for a tough series against Pakistan in a month. And then, off to Australia. Thankfully, India can thank its lucky stars that it still has a few players who could make a match out of a few of the duels that would be played out. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble and one Very Very Special player. The joke is that these people are the oldies who some sections of the media feel should give way to the likes of Suresh Raina, S. Badrinath, Venugoopal Rao, Robin Uthappa and Gautam Gambhir. Well, I did say in the very beginning, that there are questions but there are no answers.

Replacing Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid

I hope all and sundry would have now realized that T20 was a different format altogether. That is a format that relies heavily on talent and that was the reason why India and Pakistan, the two most talented teams in world cricket made the finals. The moment the game lengthens, apart from talent, temperament comes to the fore. That is one area where we are lagging behind by a long shot.

After the first two ODIs, the question of playing Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid has come to the fore yet again. It’s a clear case of not being able to plan well for a series as big as this. A good example would be to look at the opponents India is playing. Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting aren’t exactly spring chickens. They seem to be perfectly fitting into a side. That is because there is a clear plan. And players like Michael Clarke seem ready to take over from them after they have left.

The reason they can is because they have the weight of runs behind them. Not just on the account of being young or having performed well in a T20 world cup. India had just the right people to succeed the big three. Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh and Mohammed Kaif were doing well. Today we have Sehwag out of the team and Kaif out of the selectors’ minds. Yuvraj had a good 2006, so looks like the only certainty.

One reads reports and sees some ex-cricketers on the tele making it seem as if it’s the fault of Ganguly, Tendulkar and Dravid that they youngsters are not being allowed into the team. It is quite the opposite. Just because the likes of Suresh Raina and Venugopal Rao fell flat on their faces did the old brigade walk back in, and stayed put as they were performing. One needs to turn the clock back to 1996 when two youngsters announced their arrival. Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly. They did not have a pig-headed coach backing them to keep out some players and neither did they have a chairman of selectors subservient to the coach. They walked into the team on the account of their performances and consistency only. They did not knock on the doors; they smashed the doors and made India not miss the likes of Mohammed Azharuddin, Navjot Sidhu, Ajay Jadeja etc.

The current crop of Robin Uthappa, Rohit Sharma, Gautam Gambhir need to do the same. A 40 odd score in the odd match is not really enough. They need to do well consistently, as the older brigade had done when they were young. They did not have the country’s media pushing their case, quite the opposite, actually. They need to look at Mahendra Singh Dhoni. He smashed the door and made the India cap his own when there were Parthiv Patel and Ajay Ratra, as young as him if not younger, in the reckoning. The yardstick for team selection needs to be performance alone.

Turn the clock back to the just concluded series against England. India won all 3 ODIs where the old firm scored 100+ for the first wicket. The top 5 scorers for the series had Ian Bell leading, followed by Sachin, Yuvraj, Paul Collingwood and Sourav Ganguly. Tendulkar scored 4 fifties and Ganguly scored 3 of them. It is true that we need young players, but what is more important is that we need young players capable of replacing these performers.

Appointing a young captain is not the panacea that India needs to win the 2011 world cup. India needs to have a pool of 20 cricketers who can call the place rightfully theirs. And the best way to groom them is by making them push out the big three on weight of their performances alone, and not because they are all turning 35 next year. That would prove the temperament of the young brigade. Else, the die is cast.

Timeo danaos et donna ferentes, Dhoni

Mahendra Singh Dhoni is India’s skipper for ODIs now. While most of India’s press has been talking about this being a message sent out by the BCCI, that India is looking towards the future and towards the youth, I am not so sure if that is the case. I agree that this is perhaps a move in the right direction, but it seems to be a tad premature and the tenure seems to leave some important questions unanswered. Let me try and explain my predicament.

Preparing for the 2011 world cup from now seems to be the right thing to do. For winning that world cup, planning needs to be done now. But it does not seem to be planned in the right way. To win the 2011 world cup India needs a team. A TEAM. A captain is part of the team. The board first needs to identify 15 players who will be capable of winning consistently. The decision of selecting a captain who is likely to be around till 2011 is more symbolic than strategically thought out.

That is why the ‘sources in the board’ (that damned phrase again) have been hinting from behind the curtains that the holy trinity of Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar need to think of their ODI future. Nobody from the board has come out in the open and said that they will replace them by April 2008, however good their form is, as they will not be around to form the nucleus of the side in 2011. ‘Senior board officials’ have only been giving veiled sound bytes to try to look as if they are trying to do something.

One might be temped to tell Dhoni, ‘Timeo danaos et donna ferentes’. While the appointment has been made keeping the youth in mind, the youth has been given just 12 ODIs to prove his mettle as captain against two very competitive sides, one of them being the world champions for 10 years. This is certainly not looking towards the future. One needed a 1 year appointment, at the least. Another reason why Dhoni has been given a raw deal is that the 3-year veteran would be leading a side with probably no coach against two very strong teams. If MSD proves himself in these two tough series, it will be against the odds.

The board first needs to put a succession plan in place. They need to say that they will ease out the holy trinity that forms the nucleus of this side, in the next 18 months. They need to put up 15 players who will ensure that these players are not missed, and by that I mean that the 15 should be able to consistently win matches for India. That is the only way one shall not miss these three great players with 37,000 ODI runs between them. Out of those 15 players India needs the best man to lead the side. If it emerges that Dhoni is the person most capable of doing it, so be it.

This was the best chance to put somebody like a Ganguly at the helm. He should have been given a clear mandate to build a team and groom 2 people as successors. Irrespective of the results, Ganguly should have been given tenure for 18 months. Even if India would have won every series, he would have had to step down as captain at the end of it as his job would be to make a team that can compete for another 4years after that. Yuvraj Singh, Zaheer Khan, Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh and even Dhoni were players that came into the reckoning and made their marks under Ganguly. He has a proven track record and he should have been asked to build a team, especially in the absence of a coach.

People might argue that this would be taking a step down. Well, I agree. But it is necessary. Just like the hill-climbing approach, there should be provision for downward movement to be able to reach the peak. Dravid said that the shelf-life of a captain is becoming smaller. And he was captain for 2 years. Dhoni will have to be in the hot seat for 4 years till the 2007 world cup. Would it serve India’s purpose if there were to be another skipper in 2010, a year before the big tournament?

India needs to clearly chalk out succession plans and build a new team, and give timelines by when it would be achieved. The appointment of somebody with 3 years’ experience is not reason enough to bring out the champagne and celebrate the board’s forward way of thinking. They first need to appoint a good coach and build a good team. If one has a good team, an average captain can look great, but a bad team can even make the best of captains look pedestrian. Dhoni’s appointment will fall flat on the face unless a good side is created.

Sachin Tendulkar: The heart wants you to go on, but...

It has become a little distressing. After almost every big series that India plays, and also during the series, one question invariably pops up: “Are Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman already well past their sell-by date?”. The distressing part is that while this question has been asked very often, one does not have an answer to the same. The more the fans of Indian cricket think about this, they more they shuffle uncomfortably. Probably, our heart says one thing and our head says another. The one person that has really made us most uncomfortable is Sachin Tendulkar, more than Rahul, VVS and Sourav. The main reason for that is not because he has been the mainstay for Indian batting for nearly 2 decades, not because he has been at one time the best batsman in the world. Let me try and explain, dear reader, why.

As per the census conducted in 2001, the average age of Indians is 24.8 years. And how many years has Sachin been playing for? 18!! This is the reason why we get so uncomfortable, because we have a huge population that has grown up with a certain Tendulkar being an integral part for 80% of our lives. We may have never thought of the same but it is true. Sachin has been part of our childhood. Very few things have been common thru childhood, teens, adolescence and adulthood for most of us. And one of them is Sachin.

Sachin started playing when I was nine. My friends and I would watch, on TV, a fantastic batsman playing and then walk out to the grounds wanting to play like him. We have grown up from then on. We have moved on to different careers because we were never good enough to play cricket at higher levels, but each one of us still want to walk out to bat like him. That is why when we watch Sachin play now there isn’t one but 2 of us watching him simultaneously. One being the working adult that cerebrally analyses the pale shadow of a world beater and wishes that he either shapes up or ships out soon. The second being the child in us, gratified by the countless moments of joy this champion batsman has given, disagreeing with the head and wanting him to play like the young Tendulkar. We really need to ask ourselves this question: are we wishing for the young Sachin, or are we striving for some wonderful moments of our childhood?

Past series have shown that SRT is not likely to regain the form of 1995-2002. Those days of glory might never come. Do we really wish to see a champion become an also-ran? It is true that we haven’t seen anybody who can take his place. Frankly, nobody can. But he needs to be replaced, sooner rather than later. People had this apprehension when Kapil Dev was about to end his career, India’s first world-class fast bowler. True, we have not had another like him, but post his retirement we have had a line of good, competitive pacers. Srinath, Prasad, Zaheer, Sreesanth, Pathan, Munaf etc. Maybe the floodgates will open once the big three call it quits.

The problem is that around 5 top performers will leave the stage together and Indian cricket would then face a crisis that might last a few years. Replacing 5 champions is never easy. But, for the betterment of Indian cricket, it needs to be done. While all of us are grateful to these great servants of Indian cricket, we all switch on our TV sets to see India win. A Sachin duck and an India win is a lot more acceptable than a 100 for Sachin but an Indian loss. I think it’s time the fans of Indian cricket tell themselves that the end of the greats is here, and the greatest batsman India has produced is also in the winter of his cricketing career.

If Tendulkar walks out and scintillates again, a childhood would be vindicated. I hope that day comes soon, as the noises in our heads are getting louder. I think even Sachin Tendulkar would know that he has been a very important part of the ‘Wonder Years’ of most Indians. That is something nobody can take away from him. I hope he makes 2007 memorable as well. If not, we shall have no complaints. This warrior can walk away into the sunset, ending the most glorious career ever. A new generation shall then look for another hero from 2008. But what he should now know is that most Indians living now shall go to their graves with memories of SRT of 1989-2002, grateful for having grown up watching the best that ever was.

Heads I win, tails you lose

Is it not a no-win situation for people like Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly? When they score century against the minnows, Bangladesh, one can clearly see smirks on the faces of cynics, thru the articles they write and the sound bytes they give. Their rant is ‘what good is a century against Bangladesh?’. I can bet my life that the same people would have taken their knives out had these two batsmen fallen after scoring 40 runs. They’d have said that Sachin and Sourav cannot score big against the minnows as well. Clearly, a century also doesn’t help these two fine batsmen, possibly the greatest ever opening partners in the history of ODIs.

I fail to understand a simple thing. If Bangladesh is so worthless a team, why were these players considered unworthy of playing against them in the ODI series that just preceded the tests? The board and the selectors had clearly thought that they weren’t good enough to play the ODIs. They needed just one innings to assert themselves again. So what if it was against Bangladesh? Gambhir will cement his place to Ireland and England to play the Proteas and the English because of his century against the same Bangladesh. But when it comes to Sachin and Sourav, critics will say that they should still be kept out as they score against the minnows only.

This statement that, SG and SRT score against minnows only, is so flawed. If we look at their ODI records, Sachin has scored 82% of his runs against the major nations and Sourav has scored 75% of them against the major nations. By the major nations I mean, Australia, England, Pakistan, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka and West Indies. How flawed and hollow all those minnow statements look. And each and every great batsman in the world has fantastic records against the minnows, be it Jayasuriya, Ponting or Inzy. The reason why they are great batsmen, is that they have heavily scored against the other major nations also. I simply fail to understand why critics in India look at the stats of Sourav and Sachin so dogmatically.

Isn’t it a heads I win, tails you lose situation for Ganguly and Tendulkar? Despite being performers, they are ridiculed. Man of the series awards against the Windies and Lankans also counts for nothing. A century against Bangladesh counts for nothing. But when Gambhir scores a century against the same team, he is hailed as the opener for the future.