Way2Go for an Indian Captain

From hero to zero
- By Murli

Want your life to be a roller coaster ride all the way? Captain the Indian cricket team and life will be an all expenses-paid roller coaster ride. One day you are on cloud nine, and the next, in hiding behind dark clouds. Ask the current captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. After a few weeks in the hot seat, his future seems to be in his past glory days. Yes, four good years can evaporate in four bad weeks.

The toughest jobs in world cricket, said Greg Chappell, the wise old head, is being the blue-eyed boy of the Men in Blue. No truer word has been said, Amen. Blame it on the fans, dressing room politics, Board politics, groupism, ego clashes, whatever. They are all but true lies in the face of the cold, bitter and inevitable truth.

Unwind to the past and you will find a lot of dead-body-in-the-cupboard kinda evidence, when it comes to former captains. In the mid-70s, Srinivas Venkatraghavan had the singular ignominy of being the 12th man, after leading the Indian side in just the previous match! Bishen Singh Bedi became captain and short-circuited his career. Ditto Krishnamachari Srikanth, despite a quite honourable drawn series against Pakistan in Pakistan. Sunny Gavaskar, shrewd as ever, managed to go unscathed, after working out a deal with his equally ambitious and illustrious colleague, Kapil Dev. The deal: Sunny would be made the captain for the Benson and Hedges tournament (in 1986) but would relinquish his captaincy thereafter. As it transpired, Sunny went out on a high, winning the Benson & Hedges trophy in style. But he was a rare exception to the rule that hubris invariably follows an Indian captain. After the historic world cup win in '83, Kapil Dev's captaincy ended with a whimper. Mohammad Azharuddin's era got embroiled in match fixing. Sachin Tendulkar became captain and botched his record books. Saurav Ganguly was 'timed' out, while Rahul Dravid saw the writing on the Wall, well before we did, and quit gracefully.

What does all of this tell us? That to be a really great and successful captain, consistently and not just over a 5-day week or a 25-workday month, you need to be more than a very good player.

All the former captains named above were supremely talented, and the first choice in the playing eleven. But perhaps, they didn't have one quality - call it the X-Factor - that defines a leader. What is that X-Factor? It's elusive, and defies description, but can be better understood by studying those who had it. England's legendary Mike Brearley had it. Apart from our own Nawab of Pataudi (Junior).

In the informed opinion of many experts, MAK Pataudi ranks among the best captains in the history of world cricket. The home series against the mighty West Indies team in the mid-seventies - when India came from 2 down to lose 3-2 - is a classic example of how brilliantly he marshaled the limited resources at his disposal, against the world's number one team. Those were the days when India's batting started literally and metaphorically with Sunil Gavaskar and ended with GR Vishwanath. And in that series, India were even more handicapped with an injury to Gavaskar which kept him out for the first three Tests. All we had were three world class spinners, but it required a captain like Pataudi to plot a win against a team that could have outmatched even the present day's rest of the world team. Consider their batting order: Gordon Greenidge (or Roy Fredericks), Desmond Haynes, Alvin Kallicharan, Vivian Richards, Clive Lloyd, Bernard Julien. This, apart from the four, most fearsome fast bowlers in the world.