From No 2 to the Bottom of the Pit

From number two to number three; my stomach is feeling queasy. The only time Greg Chappell had been a coach he managed to take his team from number two spot to the bottom of the table. Is similar fate awaiting India as well? At the moment India has the most expensive coach in the world at her command, a person who was undoubtedly a great player in his days, also a person who is regarded by many as possessing a very sharp cricketing brain. So far we have not seen much of that famous cricketing mind in action, unless reverting to the tried and discarded strategy of sending a pinch hitter up the order is supposedly one. Or, insisting on taking three openers and then making two of them warm the benches right through the series! But that he has a sharp brain there can be no doubt about it. At a time when no country was interested in employing him as their coach and the Indian Board too seemed to be in two minds he clinched the deal by telling the Board he will get the World Cup for India in 2007. Through his natural intelligence he realised that the simplest way to obtain a contract would be to sell a dream, a dream that can only materialise at a distant future and in the event of the dream not coming true there will be nothing for him to lose because by then his contract in any case will be over. There has never been a shortage of suckers in this world; isn’t it? The Indian team is slipping, there is little doubt about it and much of the blame must lies with the coach. Take the case of Pathan, why has he lost his pace; more pertinently, did the coach not notice this and what has he done about it? At the pace that Pathan is now bowling he will be murdered even by ordinary batsmen and on all kinds of wickets. Then again take Lakshman and Tendulkar. Watching their dismissals during the Karachi Test made one feel that it was the not Lakshman or Tendulkar who were batting but their ghosts. They had a preoccupied, lost look and appeared to be playing under some kind of a mental pressure; what is it? Whose mischief is it? Instead of letting bygones be bygones and get on with the job Coach Greg Chappell is spending far too much time on a single agenda – how to keep Ganguly out of the team. For him the Ganguly affair is still a live issue. If that’s how he feels let that be so, but should it be at the expense of the Indian team? One must admit here that Ganguly, on the contrary, has shown more maturity in handling the situation. He has put all his energy into his game and the result is showing. His handling of Sohaib Akhtar in Karachi brought back the admiration of the cricket fans that he had lost.