(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)Soaps on TV take generation leaps, reality shows introduce racist bias, talent hunts have judges fight each other, news channels run SMS contests, the BCCI goes on a man hunt. That's the answer to the question, "What do power centers (read production houses and self-styled committees) do to grab the attention of the whole nation?"
While the rest have met with varying degrees of success, the BCCI's efforts have, to this day, offered so much comic relief to the game that the men in power could well call themselves the Billionaires Comic Capers Inc. Noodle straps, bimbettes and tarot card readers are no longer needed to inject the 'entertainment quotient' to a game that has its off-the-field exploits grabbing more media space than its on-field activities.
Think of it as an Abbott and Costello show, where the radio’s funniest duo, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, exchange rapid-fire questions and answers. “What do you do when an Aussie coach has had very little success and when half the nation is baying for an Indian coach?” “You contact another Aussie coach from
There is a certain novelty value in that last reason - it's a first of its kind. Since it came from the BCCI and had senior players involved in the process, we shall assume that the thought has some merit to it and attempt to extend it to associated spheres of the game. So we can now have youngsters not being selected for the Indian team because they were found to be overenthusiastic to get into the team. We could have public not allowed into stadiums because they were overenthusiastic about watching the match. We could have sponsors being rejected for being overenthusiastic about sponsoring a series or television channels being shut out for overbidding for telecast rights… Hold it. Even the BCCI doesn't get that funny.
The very fact that the BCCI is plumbing the depths amongst little-known coaches to find a replacement for Chappell clearly indicates two issues – one, nobody in his right frame of mind is interested in being the coach of the Indian team. Suddenly coaching counties, university teams and under-15 academies seem to be more enjoyable a prospect than coaching a national team – a job that was reported to have come with a crore a year package the last time around. Even that epitome of tolerance, John Wright, has decided that once was enough. Elsewhere, the impossible has started happening – Smriti Irani has finally decided to stop playing Tulsi and
The second key issue is that the Greg Chappell episode presents different views from the inside and the outside. Graham Ford's decision not to accept the position of coach for the Indian team highlights this great divide. Not only has it exposed the pathetic way in which the whole issue has been handled, but it has also brought to light the several camps that exist amongst the ex-players who were given the task of short-listing and selecting the coach.
While we have ostracized Chappell, exonerated our star players and pretended that the team’s failures are now a thing of the past, the world outside looks at the Indian team as a lost cause, a deep-rooted problem that’s beyond redemption. While we have filed away the incident as the failure of a head-strong coach who couldn't scale the heights his predecessor did, the cricketing fraternity saw a flawed system that was completely corrupted with absolute power, overflowing coffers, powermongers, politicized factions and selfish star players. We blamed the individual, but they pointed a finger at the system.
If the system was flawed, how on earth did John Wright manage a greater degree of success under similar conditions? The victory in
Different times and different people call for different measures. John Wright was, to use politically correct terminology, a man who understood ‘how the Indian system worked’. In other words, if his superstar players threw a tantrum, did not follow the training regimen or the team's game plan in the course of a match, he wouldn't take them to task. It was clear that he didn't try to take on the muck in the system, but circumvented it and chose to help out those who sought him out, even if that meant babysitting the junior-most players in the team.
Despite being one of
But he did have his own share of luck. Sehwag, Dravid and Laxman were enjoying the form of their lives, even non-performers like Agarkar came up with match-winning performances when it mattered most – like his 6 for 41 against
It was obvious that his successor from Down Under didn't share his sentiments on managing the team. Where Wright was quiet and soft-spoken, Chappell came across as loud and brash and quite clear that this was a team that needed shepherding. Only the flock didn't seem to think so. So in groups and as individuals, they planned and plotted on how to lay him out to pasture. And everything that went right during Wright's tenure turned wrong during Chappell's – Sehwag, Irfan and Harbhajan turned from bad to worse, the middle order mostly played to stake its claim in the team in both versions of the game and the bowlers, barring the dependable Kumble, generally lost it.
Most importantly, the Australian mantra of flexibility and multi-tasking didn't go down well with a nation that had only recently realised that a tailender might needed to bat and that a batsman might be needed to do more than plonk himself in the slips and hope that the ball finds its way into his hands. Shuffling batsmen up and down the order, promoting Pathan as an allrounder, trying to make the senior players as fleetfooted as he possibly could - Chappell failed in every little endeavour he embarked on.
But the way his end came must have been closely been watched by the likes of Ford and others. With the result that even
Somewhere in the outback of
Until the day big brands, celebrity management companies and zonal selectors stop having their lobbies for individual players in the corridors of power, until every player - including those who have scored 10,000 runs and above - has to perform to keep his place in the team and is ingrained with the feeling that losing a match does signify the end of the world, no coach on earth can make a difference to this team.
The Volkswagen Beetle once ran a famous TV commercial that showed the car driving through a mountain of snow and ended with the question - “Did you ever wonder how the guy who drives the snow plow got to the snow plow?” That question has to be rephrased. “Did you ever wonder how the guy who drives the Indian team got to the Indian team?”
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THE FORD FOCUS
- Born: Nov 16, 1960 in
- Played seven first-class matches for Natal B as a top order batsman
- Nurtured young talent like Shaun Pollock, Jonty Rhodes and Lance Klusener as Natal Coach
- Coached
- Succeeded Bob Woolmer as Coach of South Africa after their 1999 World Cup semi-final exit
- Sacked as coach in 2001 when the match-fixing saga was at its heights
- Turned down offer to coach
- Joined English
- Appointed
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