Is Indian cricket too much in thrall to personalities? Have we lost sight of the bigger picture, even as we focus on individual narratives? India’s wait for a major ICC trophy will go beyond a decade on June 25, and the loss in the World Test Championship (WTC) final to Australia marked a second timid surrender in the summit clash of the newest event in the global calendar.
What the final brought home in no uncertain terms was that Indian cricket cannot postpone transition any longer. With the exception of Rohit Sharma, who missed a traditionally tough assignment in South Africa in 2021-22, India’s other batting stalwarts average far below 35 in the past three years. If India even got to the WTC final, it was largely on the back of their bowling strength.
Change also cannot be rushed. Indian cricket suffered when Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman both retired after the tour of Australia in early 2012. In an ideal scenario, you blood one new face in every non-marquee series, like the one coming up against West Indies in the Caribbean. What you certainly don’t want is hundreds of Tests worth of experience being discarded at the same time.
But who has the power or authority to make such tough calls? Currently, India’s selection committee has an interim chairman. Who has the final word? The selection panel? The captain? Coach? Whose vision is being implemented? And if the system as it is currently isn’t working, how can it be fixed?
If you look at England, currently setting Test grounds alight with their brand of cricket, it seems fairly clear that Ben Stokes, the captain, and Brendon McCullum, the coach, are in charge. The rest of the structure is there to support them. Both Stokes and McCullum have a very clear idea of the brand of cricket they want to play, and they will keep selecting players based on that. No individual player is bigger than that idea.
Do Rohit and Dravid have similar authority, or are the marginal selection calls taken by others? Who has the final word on the playing XI, for example? And what is India’s philosophy in Test cricket, where there has been a noticeable tailing off in overseas results since Ravi Shastri left the coaching job?
The Greg Chappell experiment wasn’t a success partly because he saw the coach’s job more along the lines of what a top football manager does, while the rest of the Indian cricket establishment wasn’t ready for that paradigm shift. It’s pointless to talk about the kind of authority that great captains like Clive Lloyd and Ian Chappell had, because they mainly played just one format, and didn’t have to deal with the demands of franchise-based leagues at the same time.
Stokes is comfortable with McCullum taking on a great deal of responsibility because he knows he doesn’t have the bandwidth to do everything on his own. This is why the selection of the next captain or coach becomes so important. The Indian Premier League (IPL) final highlighted the importance of both captain and coach being on the same page. Hardik Pandya and Ashish Nehra clearly gel well together, just as MS Dhoni and Stephen Fleming have for a generation.
If Indian cricket chooses a captain for the foreseeable future, once Rohit’s time is up, the coach must be someone who shares his vision. Similarly, when Dravid walks away from the coaching job, his successor must be able to work with a captain who shares his philosophy.
As Indian cricket embarks on a period of churning, some egos will be bruised and hurt, and there will be a backlash from media and fans – both still largely obsessed with personalities, rather than results. Those taking the calls have to be immune to that noise.
There is a passage in Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s autobiography where he talks of a scene in the dressing room after Barcelona had lost to Internazionale of Milan in the European Champions League semifinal in 2009-10. “Guardiola was staring at me and I lost it,” it says. “I thought, ‘there is my enemy, scratching his bald head!’ I yelled: ‘You haven’t got any b***s!’ and worse than that I added: ‘You can go to hell!’ I completely lost it, and you might have expected Guardiola to say a few words in response, but he’s a spineless coward.”
The spineless coward that he talked about won his third Champions League as a coach on Saturday, while also becoming the first man to lead two different teams – Barcelona and Manchester City – to the treble of Champions League, domestic title and Cup. This is in addition to the European Cup (1992) and many other trophies that Guardiola won as a player during a stellar career at Barcelona.
Zlatan loves to boast about the league titles he won in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France, but the cold, hard reality is that he didn’t even play in the final of the Champions League, the pinnacle of club football. “Some coaches prefer players who will just do whatever he tells them to,” he once said, in another aside directed at Guardiola. “It’s like, if you’re at school with a load of 10-year-old boys and you tell them to jump, everyone will start to jump. But the intelligent boy will ask, ‘Why should I jump? Why?’ That can be difficult for a lot of coaches, and I understand that.”
The ‘boys’ he mocked included the likes of Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta, Xavi Hernandez and Dan Alves. Each started, and won, at least three Champions League finals. So if they ‘jumped’ when the ‘teacher’ asked them to, it was with good reason. It’s telling that Messi won just one Champions League after Guardiola left, that too under Luis Enrique, another authoritarian coach.
If Indian cricket wants to win again, the obsession with landmarks and records has to give way to a coherent philosophy. More importantly, it needs someone who will implement that, without fear of vested-interest groups or individual egos. The list of famous names that Guardiola kicked out is very long. But if you want to enjoy the kind of success he has had, you need that level of ruthlessness as well.