Gautam Gambhir has got a lot of hate of late. If you are India’s head coach and you are feisty, you inevitably will. Ravi Shastri is the best case in point. While social media wasn’t what it is today, Shastri was social media’s favourite whipping boy for a large part of his tenure. At times, his success in Australia or elsewhere was overlooked and plenty was said and written. That wasn’t the case with Rahul Dravid, for his personality is such that he isn’t a Ravi or a Gautam. Even then, he did get some flak for his failures as head coach.
The truth is that it is a high-pressure job. And the moment you don’t win, 50 million experts convene a kangaroo court and sit in evaluation. Each knows more about the sport, and is also a detective who has information that journalists are on the coaches’ payroll. Words like ‘PR’ and ‘payroll’ are thrown around without realising how nonsensical they sound.
Coming back to Gambhir, I have disagreed with a number of his calls. And surely will going forward. But I also know him well enough to say that the only thing he is bothered with is how the team does. He hates losing and, as head coach, all he wants is for India to win and win big. His call on Shubman Gill as India’s Test No. 4 was a masterstroke, and resulted in over 750 runs in England. His decision on Washington Sundar as a Test player caused a stir at the time. And yet, it turned out to be a superb choice in the end.
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While these are calls that have yielded success, his decision to bench Kuldeep Yadav isn’t one that has worked so far. Indeed, it should be debated and debated hard. Picking Harshit Rana or Washington ahead of Kuldeep in the first two ODIs, while Adam Zampa came in and took wickets for Australia, was a call that will and should invite scrutiny.You don’t need a pushover as coach. You need someone who will take the hard decisions and stand by them. In England, Gambhir did so time and again and, in the end, it was a series that exceeded expectations by a country mile. India have won the Champions Trophy and the Asia Cup under him, and the ledger has started to look positive. In all fairness, bilateral ODIs are a forum to experiment and check people out. But the impatience of our fans is such that every defeat will lead to resignation calls being made.
Knowing Gautam, he will not even care. He will pursue his goal, and move on thereafter. One has to have a certain dispassionate outlook towards social media to be able to do so, and Gautam is a person with such a temperament.
To give a hockey example, ahead of the Paris Olympics, Craig Fulton’s India team had lost a slew of matches in Australia. Everyone was calling for the coach’s head. Fulton, however, was unfazed. India went on to win a medal in Paris and were the only country to win back-to-back Olympic medals.
So while fans and trolls can debate till the cows come home, the truth is that Gambhir knows he is the only one accountable. It is his job to deliver. And he will.
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