A tale of two sides

Prem Panicker

For the cricket fan, the names to watch are Shane Warne, Mark Waugh, Steve Waugh, Glenn McGrath...

For the journalist, though, it is Brendan McClements -- media manager for the visiting Australian team. Whose interaction with us began even before his team had landed in India.

On Tuesday, Brendan masterminded a media get-together between the visiting Australians, and the local press. The team made to the venue -- the 1900s discotheque, in the Hotel Taj, Mumbai -- in two groups. The first group walked in bang on time, at XI. Each player in the group went to his allotted table. Before each table was ranged six chairs, each occupied by a journalist.

Each group of journalists got 10 minutes with each player, and then you moved on, as a group, to the next table. And the next. Till you had worked your way through the assembled players, at which point they left the venue and the second bunch came in and took their places.

Speaking as journalists, this was not our dream press conference. If we were dreaming, each player would have called us to his room, given us all the time we wanted to ask all the questions we wanted, and we would then have moved on to the next player.

But that is an impossible dream to dream -- there were close to 50 journalists present at the Taj yesterday, and if the Australian players were to give unlimited time to each of them, then Steve Waugh and his men would have had time for nothing else, till the first Test. This way, we all got to talk to all the players and if our minds rebelled somewhat at having to ask our carefully thought out questions in public and watch some other reporter, who hadn't done his homework, jotting down the answers, well, tough.

The point was, the Australians do have a media manager. The players do make themselves available. And they do answer your questions, patiently and politely -- and that politeness is surprising, considering some of the inanities I heard being asked. Like, would you believe this pretty young thing who, sitting vis a vis Ricky Ponting, went, "Ricky, is it important to use your feet when playing spin?"

Contrast this with the situation prevailing in the home camp. Imagine you are a journalist, attending the coaching camp, and wanting to do the interviews your editor keeps screaming for. So you walk up to a player, give him your card, and ask for some time. "Ask my coach," he says.

So you ask the coach. "You need the board's permission," he says. So you ask the board. "Only the captain and coach are permitted to talk," the board, in the person of Jaywant Lele, says. So you ask the captain for an interview. "So sorry -- if you were a newspaper I could have done it, but I can't talk to a dotcom, since I am signed on exclusively by another one."

Huh? An exclusive contract with a dotcom could mean that the person thus contracted writes only for them, appears on live chat on that dotcom, and so on. But he is also the captain (and in passing, we must mention that this is not about any particular captain -- all those who have led India in the age of dotcoms have suffered from an identical disease) of a side, and as such, beyond narrow media affiliations -- in fact, it is mandated that he talk to any and all sections of the media.

But who is to argue? You give up, and go away.

But, you will point out, I've read interviews with players on rediff, with your bylines on it.

Yeah, well, sure you have. And yes, BCCI or no, we have interviewed various players. But it is not SOP -- how it works is, you spend endless amounts of time hanging around, you smile at the players as they walk past, then the next time you say hello, the third time you say hi how're you doing, then you try for another sentence, and so on and on, till you gradually make friends with the player concerned.

And then you ask him for an interview. And he obliges.

Having gone through the grind for well over a year now, we were surprised at how easy it was to talk to the Australians, how accessible they were. Having been filled to the gills by the BCCI with 'reasons' why the Indian players were not allowed to talk to the media, we were curious about how the Australians handled the potential problems.

"These are all grown up men," team manager Steve Bernard responds. "They are adults, professionals, they have lives, families, of their own, they occupy responsible places in society. So you act on the presumption that they know how to handle themselves in public, that they know what they can talk about and what they can't, and that they will weigh the repercussions of their words before speaking. Where is the sense in gagging them?"

That sounds logical -- but where then does that leave the Indian cricketers?

Are we to understand that, as per the BCCI, the Indian players are juveniles, that they have no standing in society, that they are akin to prisoners let out on parole, that they are such idiots, and possess such low IQs, that disaster will strike if they so much as open their mouths to yawn in the vicinty of us media people?

That seems to be how the BCCI rates the Indian players, judging by the no-speaking rule. And it is a pity.

You could argue, and say this is the crib of a couple of journalists who want access, who want to put their bylines to 'exclusive' interviews.

Not so -- that is not the point behind this particular diatribe.

Have you noticed how, when India tours abroad, the team never gets a good press?

Contrast this with the Australians (we could, equally, use the South Africans as another example). Before the media briefing, we had our own concept of the Australian team -- as a bunch of tough-talking, occasionally foul-mouthed guys who are due a comeuppance when the Tests begin.

Having spent time with them, we have a different image. Of 14 individuals who think as one. Of a team that is united in its goals, unanimous in its support of the captain. An image of a focussed, committed bunch -- who know what they are here to do, how they are going to do it, and are hell bent on achieving the success they have set as their collective goal.

We sat and listened to one bowler talk of how his job was to create pressure at one end so that his partner could attack and take wickets at the other. We listened to a batsman tell us that as he saw it, his job was to take the brunt of the Indian attack when it was fresh, so that it would become easier for his mates lower down in the order to come in and slam the ball around. We listened to player after player eschew the personal, and talk of collective goals.

And we came away impressed.

This is why teams that focus on media relations -- like the Aussies, and the Proteas -- get such good press wherever they go. It is also why the Indian team never gets positive write-ups when on tour. Thanks to the BCCI and its policies, the players are never allowed to interact with the media of the host country. How, then, is the media supposed to write anything about them, positive or otherwise? Perceptions come from understanding -- and without access, there is no way you can understand a player, a team.

We know this. You know this. The players, chafing under the needless restraints imposed on them, know this. But none of that matters -- the BCCI does not know, cannot appreciate, this simple truth.

"The Indian team will have a media manager in one month," said Dr A C Muthiah. This was in late November. It is now late February -- and as you think back to that statement, you realise that the Board president omitted to tell us one little thing -- to wit, which 'one month' was he talking about?

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh