Under the new dispensation post-Narayanaswamy Srinivasan’s being sent
to gulag of sorts, there appears to be an ushering of glasnost within
the Indian cricket board.
It came as a pleasant surprise to the
media when national selection committee chairman Sandip Patil
accompanied new board secretary Anurag Thakur to explain the
thought-process behind the selection of the Test and One-day squads for
Bangladesh.
The secretary was himself more voluble and willing to
talk on any subject unlike some of his predecessors who used to say
"Gentlemen, I am not empowered to add anything more than merely
releasing the squad or scheduling of international matches".
During Srinivasan's regime, these announcements were reduced to e-mailed handouts!
It is to be seen how long the new found openness continues.
The
confirmation of the prevailing chaos in the board came from the chief
of the three-member Supreme Court committee appointed to fix the quantum
of punishment for the culprits of betting in the Indian Premier League
(IPL).
Committee chairman and former chief justice of India
Rajendra Mal Lodha wondered whether there was any authority in the board
after he found its president Jagmohan Dalmiya's speech "incoherent and
incomprehensible" when the committee met him in Kolkata last week.
Dalmiya
has mildly protested to insist that illness has not hampered his
functioning as board chief and Anurag Thakur, in the first flush as new
secretary, tried to send out a message that he is the man running the
board -- though he was not allowed to run for presidency by his
Bharatiya Janata Party of which he is an MP.
The next thing, one
astonishingly witnessed, was the Test and One-Day captains freely taking
pot shots at each other, making it clear that they were no longer bound
by any contractual obligation not to talk on certain contentious issues
during and after a tour.
In any case, these are not issues that
could not have ben talked out in the dressing room or sorted out by the
team director. The Test captain has openly stated who his preferred
choice is for the post of team director and his ODI counterpart said why
a batsman or a bowler doesn't fit into his scheme of things. The
utterances raised doubts whether it is going to be a free for all.
What
is incomprehensible is the studied silence of the board president and
the secretary. Instead of reprimanding the two senior pros going public
on their differences or, for that matter, snubbing Ravichandran Ashwin
and Suresh Raina for coming out in support of ODI skipper Mahendra Singh
Dhoni, the two top board officials helplessly watched the players
bicker. Even junior cricketer Mohammad Shami had his say on the
purported rift between the two top guns.
With no one from the
team coming in his support, Test captain Virat Kohli himself took on his
ODI captain in a veiled attack. He attributed the ODI series-loss in
Bangladesh to "doubtful decision-making" and that, he said, showed on
the field.
There are wheels within wheels. Ashwin offering to die
for his One-Day captain is as insane as Dhoni's own ridiculous line
soon after winning the World Twenty20 championship in South Africa that
he wants his players to be ready to go before a speeding truck for him.
Ashwin,
perhaps, is peeved at Harbhajan Singh being brought back to the Test
side to undermine his pre-eminence and Raina may also be feeling a
threat to his place once Dhoni goes.
These are the kind of games
most captains and senior players play -- just as Virender Sehwag and
Gautam Gambhir felt they had been hard done by Dhoni to make sure that
there was no threat to his position as captain in the foreseeable
future.
Both Sehwag and Gambhir were upset over Dhoni's
rotation policy in Australia three years ago and made snide remarks
against him for saying that he could not afford playing both as well as
Sachin Tendulkar together in the eleven as all three were slow movers on
the field. For good measure he added that the team would be handicapped
to the extent of 15-20 runs if all three are included.
Things
had come to such a sorry pass that there were stories in the media of
Dhoni bringing to the notice of the board about Gambhir playing only to
save his position in the team without really being part of its strategy
and reportedly cited two run-outs the Delhi left-hander was involved in
during the 2012 series against England to prove his point.
From
time to time, such stories -- some true and some others inspired --
filtered out of the dressing room for the rumour mills to work overtime.
The board pushed in player-officials from state associations into the
selection committee to keep a check on the players.
Yet, the
ganging up of selectors twice almost removed the captain and both the
times the then powerful board president vetoed the move. Dalmiya saved
Sourav Ganguly in the first instance and the next occasion saw
Srinivasan coming to Dhoni's rescue. And come to think of it, both have
been the most successful captains for India!
Differences between
players is old pickle -- and there have been instances when some of
them appeared to be coming to blows. Senior players have always argued
in the dressing room, but most of them are seen as part of team
discussions.
What a dressing room it must have been when Ganguly,
Tendulkar, Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid, Sehwag, Harbhajan, V.V.S. Laxman,
Zaheer Khan and Gambhir were part of it. Almost all of them selected
themselves on the basis of the sheer weight of their respective
performances.
The players eventually sort their problems out in
their own interest. As in politics, here too there are no permanent
cliques and equations even if the players come from the same state or
region.
(Veturi Srivatsa is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])
