Aaah!................ another tournament has passed India has lost and, predictably the daggers are out! Funnily, those who should be giving us answers are also asking questions of the players. Harsha Bhogle sums it up very aptly…”Those who call for the heads of our cricketers are among those who bow deferentially at the first opportunity. Currently we are armed with hindsight, that greatest of all selectors. It bestows on us great wisdom and sagacity but delivers no results.”
After having gone through all this brouhaha and ranting about the failure(s) of our cricket team I have been very fortunate enough to retain some of my sanity. Enough to develop an understanding of the situation at hand which allows me to understand the debacle. These are not the times for drastic measures like rolling of heads but instead to take time off, understand the situation in its entirety. We are now on the brink of the time when the troika of great Batsmen have started their walk towards the twilight of their career. And mind you! they were all “great” batsmen. We have been fortunate enough to have been born in the era when three of the best batmen ever in cricketing history played together in a team...it was almost like the pace quartet of the west Indies of the eighties and the spin quartet of India. All three, over the last 15 years have given us many reasons to celebrate and have taken us to the pinnacle of Test Cricket and this only comes through consistent performance and we all know that consistency is an adjective which is hardly associated with Indian cricket. But these three gentlemen who respond to the names of Tendulkar Dravid and Ganguly in their different manners have striven to give India that quality which had eluded us….consistency along with talent. They were helped in no less measure by the brilliance of Laxman and brutality of Sehwag. But that age is about to end and we should realize that all of the players named above were “special” players and in no way representative of the way Indian batsmen are. Well one could say that Dravid from amongst all of them is the most “Indian” in his temperament but that too from the old Gavaskarian school of cricket where batting meant more of a penance of renunciation.
So playing the short ball is still a tricky question and the “moving” ball is a threat after all. A look at our history would tell us that we never been sprightly at the sight of a ball being dropped short. A Gavaskar or a Mohinder Amarnath were aberrations at best when it came to playing the short pitched ball. We have been lulled into believing that with the advent of all these brilliant batsman at one go, our overall systems and the abilities of the players have improved and that we would retain the top-spot in Test cricket. But that, unfortunately, is not the case! Our domestic season is played on very underprepared wickets and is able to generate very little interest amongst the junta.
These are long term questions to which answers need to be found out and the good thing is these are cricketing questions and we have the best cricketing brains to find out answers. But what appalls me is the attitude of the parent body…the BCCI. Instead of finding out answers the first news which is emanating out from the BCCI corridors is that heads are going to roll. Such a perfect way of deflecting the attention on them to the cricketers. The problem lies not just in the ability of the players but in the attitude of the BCCI. Abilities can be fixed but attitude(s) I am afraid are almost impossible to mend unless there is introspection….and the BCCI into a nothing but introspection. Yes there are a few players about whom questions about attitude apart from ability are also being asked…..take action against them by all means. And if this has a consistent manner to it please take urgent action but what good will it serve to axe a captain who has, in real terms, taken up the captaincy right from where Saurav Ganguly had left off! I say this by acknowledging the fact that Anil Kumble though a very good captain was there as a stop gap arrangement till M S Dhoni could take over as the full time captain. And we also need to understand that judgments are about a situation are personal and are taken by considering the situation at hand also the interpretation of circumstances. A lot of cricketing decisions are intuitive by nature and therefore prone to failures. If we are able to accept this fact of life and sports then it would become easy to accept defeat and the fact that the other team played better than us and won and that there are days and tournaments when nothing goes your way. We have to stop believing that our team is always going to perform and accept the failures as part of human nature. We also have our goof ups in office don’t we. Just because they are earning more money doesn’t mean that they are not prone to such frailties. Havent heard any such witch hunting of players in Australia or in South Africa when their team loses in a big tournament or when Australia were down in the depths during the early 80s under Border.
Now the IPL question……… to my mind IPL is a substandard tournament which has hype surrounding it because of the extensive media coverage and the glamour attached to it. Although it has given us the Vijays the Jadejas and the Yusuf Pathans, not many have been able to make their mark in the international arena; at least not until this piece was being written. But to say that IPL tired the players out is a bit of an overstatement, because the team played two matches and won them comfortably and one of the teams was South Africa. Clearly there are cricketing reasons of technique and temperament against the rising ball which need to be sorted out. And yes players who have been consistently out of form should be dropped to give youngsters like Cheteshwar Pujara a chance to prove their mettle. Probabalt the Board also need to look at the way they are scheduling tourneys and series’ right left and center so that they are help players recover from injuries especially fast bowlers; and I don’t think that it is mere coincidence that it is almost the fast bowlers who are charged up in the first couple of seasons and then suddenly dip to become trundling medium-pacers…and I don’t have to give examples to substantiate my case.
So we need to be aware that this is a transition period for Indian cricket and we need to look for batsmen who are able to fill up the void created by the “troika” and also lessen the burden on the players especially the fast bowlers so that they are less injury prone. And the Board has to look beyond than just sacking captains…… maybe even a professional set of administrators who are more accountable and who have a vision for cricket in India.
