Can't understand, so can't explain!
Prem Panicker
Of late, I have been having this email exchange with an Australian sports
fan, who stumbled onto Rediff while checking for Olympics news and, judging
by his mails, appears to have begun following Indian cricket, and sport,
with a vengeance.
Midway through this mail exchange, he sent me a mail with just this in it:
"Prem, when I asked you about Indian hockey, you blamed the administration.
When I ask you about Indian cricket, you blame the administration. Sounds
strange, mate, from where I sit, it sounds like you have found a convenient
whipping boy in the administration. Have you considered that it could be
because of a lack of talent in India?"
How does one explain? How would anyone who has not lived a lifetime in this
country, even begin to understand the dimensions of the problem? While
hockey is not the theme of this article, a brief digression might be in
order. Try telling a foreigner that after the Indian hockey team returned
from Sydney with a seventh place finish to show for all that talent, the honourable K P S Gill, who heads Indian hockey and thus qualifies as
the 'administration', had this to say: "We are not worried, we are planning
for the 2008 Olympics, we have the juniors to win that one. And we are also
working towards winning the next World Cup."
Hullo? Does this mean that Athens 2004 does not count? Since Gill has no
plans for that edition of the Olympics, will he spare the nation the expense
of sending a team there? Does he imagine that India is the only country in
the world producing 'juniors', that throughout the rest of the
hockey-playing world, births were frozen a few years ago, leading to a
situation where, come Olympics 2008, India will be the only country which
will have young players? And is he even aware that far from planning to win the
next hockey World Cup, the immediate task for India is to even qualify to
get into it?
Now try explain a KPS Gill to a foreigner -- what you will get is a blank
look and a shake of the head. Said foreigner will imagine that to cover up
the deficiencies in our country's hockey, we have invented a 'Gill' just so
we can trot out the name at any and every opportunity, as a handy excuse.
Or take cricket. How, for instance, do we explain to a foreigner that just
ahead of team selection for the Sharjah triangular, the team management sent
in a request for an off-spinning all-rounder, arguing that Sri Lanka and
Zimbabwe, the two other teams in the triseries, have their fair share of
left-handers and therefore, the off spinning option would come in handy
(remember how Sachin Tendulkar made a similar request, ahead of the West
Indies tour, and the selectors 'taught him a lesson' by sending him Noel
David, and that only when Javagal Srinath broke down? Anyone hear of Noel
David after that?).
How do we explain that the team management -- which
includes coach Anshuman Gaekwad, captain Saurav Ganguly, vice captain Rahul
Dravid and senior player Sachin Tendulkar, asked for Vijay Bharadwaj as
their preferred off-spinning all rounder -- and the selectors in their
wisdom turned the request down, deciding that India did not need an off
spinner?
Who -- other than an Indian whose mind is calloused, and heart numbed,
through years of suffering such idiocy -- would believe you if you told them
that?
Who would believe that a bunch of selectors who, between them, have not even
once stepped out onto the field at Sharjah, presume to know the conditions
there better than players who play there at least twice each year? Who would
believe that a bunch of selectors with their xerox copies of scoresheets
have been set up as the better judges of a player's potential than senior
players who have actually played with Bharadwaj?
Kevin Ripley might. But even the man behind the Believe It or Not series
will have trouble swallowing some of the stuff that goes on behind the
scenes. Consider this: In course of casual conversation, a national player
asks a selector, one of the famous five, about Bharadwaj. Why, the national
player wants to know, is Bharadwaj not being considered any longer? 'Oh,'
says the selector, casually, 'Bharadwaj was a wrong selection, a mistake. He
is not fit for international cricket, we won't be considering him again.'
(By way of aside, the same selector told the same player they had made a
"mistake" with another player -- M S K Prasad).
So casually, and with such disdain, are careers blighted. Would my
Australian correspondent believe that? Would Kevin Ripley? Would you?
For now, let us leave aside the cricketing qualifications of Vijay
Bharadwaj. Let us say that the selector in question, voicing the opinion of
the all-knowing five, was right in his assessment that Bharadwaj is not
suited to the big time.
Question one: Has any one of the five had the basic human decency to inform
the player concerned, what their views are? That he should stop going to bed
in hope, the day before each new team selection exercise, and waking up in
despair when, yet again, he learns from the morning paper that he has not
been considered?
No.
Question two: Have the selectors, individually or collectively, had the
courage of their conviction and, fuelled by that courage, publicly informed
the media their views about Bharadwaj? After all, we reporters keep bringing
up his name, and the chairman of the selectors, serving as mouthpiece for
his fellows, as regularly stalls with lines like 'He was considered, but...'
Would not basic honesty demand that the chairman of selectors voice the
collective thinking in regard to this player? And in passing -- who pays for
the as yet officially unacknowledged 'mistake'?
How did it go again? Chandu Borde, after announcing the team for Sharjah,
responding to a question about Vijay Bharadwaj: "We have not seen him for a
long time and do not know about his injury status. Therefore, we have
decided to go ahead with the same team."
A player is not considered because selectors have not "seen him for a long
time"? What then is their job, if not to keep tabs on the players? "We do
not know about his injury status." Do they not know about telephones --
those handy little gadgets through which you can communicate with just about
anyone, these days, asking stuff like? 'Hi, there, pal, long time no hear,
how's that injury of yours doing?' Or fax machines, those even more handy
gadgets through which medical reports can be sent from point A to point B,
eliminating that middleman, the postman?
Did they ask for a medical report? No.
Were they telling the truth, when they said that unawareness of his fitness
is the reason he was not considered? No.
Would my Australian friend believe this? No.
From my good friend Jaywant Lele, convenor of the selection committee
meeting under discussion, this: "We had received a request from the team
management for an off spinner, but the selectors decided that continuing
with the same combination was better suited for the team."
Maybe next time, when the team fails, we should be demanding an explanation
not of the captain or the players, but of the selectors and Lele. If they
know best (never mind the "mistakes" they make and admit to in private),
then shouldn't they be the ones giving the long-suffering Indian cricket
fans the answers we seek?
What I am about to write is absolutely pointless, so unless you have nothing
better to do with your time, I suggest you shut down this browser right now.
For what I intend to do is look at an alternate scenario, a different
mindset, for the Sharjah tour.
Quick, without referring to records, can you tell me which teams played the
last two editions of the Sharjah triangulars? No? Does that, then, give you
an indication of how insignificant those desert thrashes are? We already
know one thing for sure -- the only people for whom the Sharjah tournaments
matter are the bookies, and the big-time punters. We can infer, too, that
the board is only too willing to send its team to that venue for the
exclusive benefit of those two sections of the population -- why, otherwise,
would the board accept less guarantee money to send its team to Sharjah,
than to other one-day tournaments elsewhere in the world?
But if you stay with the basic premise that winning or losing yet another
Sharjah slugfest does not really matter in the overall scheme of things,
then consider where Indian cricket stands now. A few senior citizens have
been benched. A few others are now running on motor memory and the last
remnants of their fuel. At the same time, we have a bunch of talented
youngsters who did the country proud in the Junior World Cup.
Would not this have been the ideal time, and the ideal opportunity, to have
given them a chance to strut their stuff at a higher level?
Could not the selectors have, for Sharjah, rested all the seniors --
Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Prasad, Agarkar, Kambli et al -- and in their
place, picked the likes of Navneet Ricky, of Ritender Sodhi and SS Das and
Santosh Saxena and Laxmi Ratan Shukla and ... never mind, you know the
names.
Three wicket-keepers -- Ajay Ratra, Vijay Dahiya, Reuben Paul -- were picked
in the preliminary squad for Kenya. Dahiya made the final cut -- with, thus
far, indifferent results. Would not the Sharjah tournament have been an
opportunity to try either Ratra, or Paul?
Why must we do this, could be the counter question.
The answer is simple -- we are at the start of a season. We have, ahead of
us, a home series against Zimbabwe. More importantly, we have a home series
against Australia early next year. We beat them at home, they beat us on
their soil. Now it is round three -- and we owe it to ourselves to field our
best possible squad.
By giving the youngsters a chance to test their feet in international waters
against more than decent opposition, we would have had an opportunity to
assess, at first hand and in the heat of competition, their potential and
prospects. Thus, when it came to picking sides for the sterner tests, we
would have a database of quality information to base our selection on.
That is a huge positive, right there. And what is the downside? We might
have lost a Sharjah thrash (and who knows, the youngsters, playing with
pride and as yet undimmed passion, might even have surprised all of us). So
who cares, besides the bookies?
But we don't believe in thinking, do we? We don't believe in looking ahead,
in planning for the future -- sufficient unto the day, could well be the
motto engraved on the BCCI coat of arms.
So, come time for the next team selection, our venerable chairman of
selectors can come before the public, and say, "We haven't seen Sodhi and
Ratra and Paul and Ricky and the others play against any kind of decent
opposition, we don't know if they are good enough, so we have decided to
retain the same team."
I wish I could explain all this to my Australian correspondent. But to
explain something to someone else, you first have to understand it,
yourself.
I don't.
Do you?
Prem Panicker
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