Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly - Sulking skipper, sinking sense, his fate and future

9,945 runs, including 22 centuries, in 270 one-day internationals and 4,949 runs for an average of about 41 in 82 Tests. That is an impressive fact sheet, with a rider: It just does not seem to belong to the Indian skipper who is struggling to differentiate between the bat and the ball when he is on the field. Poor chap.

So the trial has begun. And the doomsayers as well as the perennial believers of the fallen prince of Kolkata have taken up cudgels for and against the beleaguered Indian skipper. What has given fodder to those who would suck the blood out of Ganguly is this: In the recent three-match Test series against Pakistan, the Indian skipper scored only 48 runs in six innings while his ODI score was 0, 9, 4 and 18 before he was slapped with a six-match ODI ban by ICC Match Referee Chris Broad for India's slow-over-rate at Ahmedabad. Isn’t that fair enough an argument to throw Ganguly to the dustbin of Indian Cricket. It is.

Forget the skipper’s cap, even the team cap would have been a distant proposition for the flamboyant Ganguly, had he not been in India. And if he did not have the backing of a person named Jagmohan Dalmia, who decides who should breath what and how in Indian cricketing echelons. Ganguly, the skipper, Ganguly the batsmen and Ganguly the player is too fortunate. If he were in any other side, he would not be in benches; he would not be even benched, as the techies would put it. He would simply be shown the door.

So is poor form akin to Ganguly alone? Not really. Most players go through this lean patch in their career. But when a nation of one billion is represented in its most watched sport by eleven men, and when you are leading it, you should be The Skipper, rather than skipping the media for reasons best left unsaid.

The problem with our folks is that we can’t go beyond names. Whether it is Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev or Azhar.

That is why Gavaskar was able to lead a team out of the ground just because he though a decision against him was unfair. If it had happened today, the little master and his team would have paid a big price.

That is why Sachin Tendulkar can wail to the media that he was deprived another sick milestone called a double ton by his captain, when his captain thought he was struggling to score even at a snails pace and hence it was important for the country to win a Pak series rather than wait for the man to take home a double ton to present his sponsors. In any other team scenario, Sachin would have been “rested” for the next couple of matches for indiscipline.

It didn’t happen. Cause again we rested at the laurels of his umpteen tons. Fortunately India won that match. If not the man who made the declaration, Dravid, would have been in a tight spot than what Ganguly is now.

Agreed Ganguly was daring enough to take the opposition to task (read take off his shirt). But that was long back. And leading the team may not necessarily mean throwing around his weight or showing your middle finger at the opposition vultures right in the middle of the ground. Unfortunately many think so. That is why we still stick to the Gavaskars and Gangulys.

We hardly win matches by team effort, and this is because we don’t have a team we have only a bunch of super cricketers who can play to the galleries as well as play for their MNC promoters, but not as a team against their rivals on the field. That is why we win comfortably, but lose without an iota of a fight.

So, along with the captain’s dangling job, a slot for coach is also up for grabs. And many names from Greg Chappel to Dean Jones are also doing the rounds to take up the coveted job. But the tragedy again is that most of the names we have on he table are legendary or great batsmen, but not a single bowler.

So do we have only a batting department? No, the case is that, cricket till the last decade was dominated by batsmen, barring the West Indian pace battery, that most of the plum slots always went to the batsmen. Get a list of Captains and chief of selectors and take a bet without doing a Google search that an overwhelming majority of them are batsmen and not bowlers.

Times have changed. We can’t anymore have a Gavaskar who can score 30-odd runs in double that number of overs in the near vicinity of the nets. We need precision bowlers who can bowl on the dot in slog overs. We need people who understand bowlers as coaches. We need people who know that cricket is not about throwing your superhuman size bat on the red leather and tossing it out of the ground.

So why can’t we have a batting coach as well as bowling coach? No one has an answer why we can’t and that’s the best reason why we should have exactly that. And as for coaching, the job is best left to a foreigner. Because, coaching in India, especially in cricket, has been just a vocation retired cricketers were bestowed upon by the BCCI. There was no serious thought about the key role of a coach till the appointment of John Wright. Remember, we had many stalwarts who were Wright’s peers during their playing time, but it was Wright who was the better choice for the coach’s slot. Hopefully, no one would disagree on this.

In his swansong, Wright lamented that said he had a wrong problem with selection panel. He didn’t have a vote while selecting or rejecting the players. Now that is a unique problem we should do away with. If you are to mould a team, you have to have a say in whom to select and reject. That is plain commonsense. And commonsense is what we woefully lack.