The 2001 tour of South Africa was a disaster for the Indian cricket team. Luckily, Mike Denness, an umpire, punished Indian players so severely that the battle turned into one between him and India, and India's frailty was forgotten. Although I was pained as an Indian, I was not so inclined to think ill of Denness. He was very unlucky; England under his captaincy was battered twice by Australia. He was just 73 when he died in 2013. This column was published in Business Standard of 4 February 2001.
Team sickness
I enjoy watching cricket. I have not watched the
Indian team much in South Africa; I am enough of an Indian to be pained by its
performance. When I have watched, I did remark the team’s tendency to appeal
even on occasions when the batsman was clearly not out – and the penchant of
some of the Indian players to look aggrieved and out of sorts when the appeal
was denied. I have for years watched Sachin do something to the ball. I thought
he was talking to it, or caressing it or whatever; but it could have been
scratching it. So I do not find Michael Denness’s punishments outrageous.
Nowadays an umpire’s job is not just to make binary decisions about dismissals,
fours, byes and so on, but to maintain a certain level of decorum on the field.
From that point of view Denness’s action was not very wise; it is better to
control the field lightly but continuously instead of doing nothing most of the
time and then coming down like a ton of bricks. That is poor judgment, not
necessarily poor decision-taking.
More than this isolated episode, which will soon
cease to matter, I am concerned by the fact that the Indian team is less than a
sum of its players. For the team has players who individually can match those
of Pakistan and South Africa; but collectively their performance is much below
that of either of those countries. Why?
Cricket is always a battle amongst unequals: two
batsmen are surrounded by 11 opponents. In theory, the only aggressor is the
bowler. But in fact, the other players join in intimidating the batsmen.
Different teams have different specialities. The Australians work as a tribe,
and combine abuse, gestures and in-jokes to great effect. The Pakistanis have a
sardar – usually the wicketkeeper – who keeps chivvying the other players;
“C’mon!”, “Shabash”, and Urdu swearwords are the mainstay. The Indians are not
so bonded as these other teams, and have not had a coordinated strategy of
aggression.
Saurav Ganguli sees in this his team’s prime
weakness. He carries a big chip on his shoulder. He is often aggressive. He
clearly thinks he is only retaliating against others’ misbehaviour. Lately he
seems to have organized other Indian players to behave in the same way.
Excessive appealing is only a part of the aggression.
Whether this is a good thing or bad, it has not been
an effective strategy; the Indians’ aggression does not frighten any good
batsman to get out faster than he would. Indeed, going by the results, the
effect has been just the reverse. The question is whether all this investment
in aggression is yielding any return.
For one thing, it can yield returns only half the
time – while a team is fielding. Batsmen hardly have a chance to demoralize the
opposite team, except by batting successfully – and it is in batting that the
Indian team has failed spectacularly. Despite having such formidable batsmen as
Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly, its batting performance is distinctly
inferior to that of its opponents. This is where underperformance is most
obvious, and no amount of verbal aggression can improve it.
Batting requires the greatest psychological
resources: amidst all the aggression of the other side and the distractions
posed by the crowd, it requires concentration – concentration on the bowler, on
the ball, and on the field placings. Every match brings new uncertainties:
uncertainties of the pitch, bowling, tactics and weather. A good batsman takes
in all these inputs and avoids the mistakes they can force him into: he refuses
the chances he is given to get out. A great batsman quickly absorbs the inputs
and exploits them to score. This is where Indians are failing currently. They
are not taking their job seriously. And Ganguly is failing to make them take it
seriously.
It would be unfair to blame Ganguly alone for this.
He is not incompetent; he is just clueless. Nothing he tries works. I am sure
that he hectors his team off the field; but the hectoring does not work. It is
like in politics. Leaders give their followers the signal that they would get
ahead by rushing into the well of Parliament, shouting their heads off,
organizing campaigns against the government – and being obedient. So they do
all these things; the one thing they are not rewarded for is good government.
Maybe Ganguly is close to the conclusion that even a
genius cannot make this Indian team perform. The best young Indians go into
software companies; they do not play cricket. The structure of interstate
competition is such that the chances of a good player making it to the top are
highly uneven; and the selection process is such that most players can be
almost sure they cannot make a steady career out of cricket. More cricketers
dream of becoming advertisement idols than of becoming great batsmen. In these
circumstances, it is difficult to forge a winning team from the material that
the byzantine selection throws up.
Conversely, the chances of forging one are so slim
that few cricketers would be prepared to take on the challenge. What happens is
that the BCCI favours the best batsmen for captaincy; and since there are
always half a dozen test batsmen around, it is usually possible to find a
sacrificial goat. If Saurav Ganguly thinks he is one, the earlier he gives up
his captaincy, the better. There may be – must be – a more talented bakra
around.
