Bringing some perspective

Why am I writing this? My biggest motivation is, there seems to be somewhere along the line, a lack of perspective in judging our cricket.

What are the facts? India has won a lot of one-dayers (mostly at home or at least on the sub-continent) recently, and a majority of them very convincingly. We have been average in tests.

We are looking for reasons for this seeming disparity. Which is fine. Are we to presume however, that the upswing in one-day form is solely or majorly a result of exceedingly good, current cricketing management? This would naturally imply that the former management was somehow vastly different from the present one and was to be blamed for the slump that occurred at the time.

Must we however, always look to management decisions and attribute results to supposed shifts in operational rationales? Perhaps, this is symptomatic of a society that makes heroes out of managers and seeks to canonize management principles into guiding lights of life.

Let us look back at the type of cricketing decisions that were made during the Ganguly-Wright tenure. Let us consider the most far-reaching of them:

1. A middle-order batsman who was known as a fair biffer of average bowling and bowled part-time off-breaks was suddenly slotted in as opener. 2. A half-forgotten teenaged offie whose action had been under the scanner and was low on confidence was given the task of leading a Kumble-less attack against the world's best team. 3. Spotting the fluency of his batting in the first innings of a crucial test, a brilliant wristy middle-order bat who had been low on confidence after seemingly endless attempts at making him open, was promoted to one-drop in the second innings. 4. Two youngsters were blooded in the Kenya ICC knockout and both performed brilliantly, considering this was their debut series. Another middle-order bat and electric fielder was picked soon after. All three were persisted with, even when they lost form. 5. A teenaged 'keeper was picked and was asked to open against arguably the fastest bowler in the world a couple of series later, despite performing poorly behind the stumps. 6. An exciting strokeplayer of a 'keeper was picked, slotted in at number 3 and played among the fiercest ODI knocks played by an Indian. 7. A left-arm swing bowler of great potential was picked and later, his batting started to develop. 8. A right arm swing bowler of immense potential was picked and performed brilliantly on his first full tour. 9. Arguably India's best legspinner of all time, was dropped from time to time, on occasion when the younger offie was felt to be more potent.

Let us examine some of the team management decisions in more recent times: 1. Promote Pathan to part-time open, at times one-drop. 2. Push Yuvraj up the order to number 4. 3. Blood three fast-medium bowlers and an exciting middle order bat and fielder.

Are these three vastly different in nature from the previous set of nine? Surely not. Couldn't some of the first set of decisions be termed experimentation? Absolutely. The decision to promote Sehwag was surely the biggest experiment of them all. So, what is the difference between the team toward the end of the Ganguly-Wright tenure and the present team? The full emergence of a 'keeper batsman, the flowering of Pathan's batting talent, the entry of three fast-medium bowlers and the maturing of Yuvraj. It is worth remembering that the first two events had begun to happen during the Ganguly-Wright partnership and the early grooming of Yuvraj was also done then. Therefore, it is more than likely that the first two would have happened irrespective of who was in charge of team management.

Yuvraj probably feels more secure in the team right now because he is part of the test team as well. The step up to test level that happened more consistently after Ganguly's departure was at a crucial stage of his career. Equally, we must not forget that if not for Ganguly, he might never have been in the one-day side for so long.

What has happened after the passing trough in India's ODI performance graph, is a very natural evolutionary process. The nucleus of a strong side gets built and then as a result of a strong back-up system (the A tours and the under-19s), newer all-round players emerge. If you look at the Australian and England teams of the last decade or so, much the same things have happened. Border built a side from scratch (to draw a parallel, if England at the time was as strong as the current Australian side, dare I say Australia would have lost in the '87 World Cup finals), Taylor, Waugh and Ponting have taken it to newer levels. Hussain made a strong side, Vaughan has built on its gains. Similarly will Dravid.

Have we read reports that have stressed so much on the elimination of deadwood when the captains left these good sides that later became great(Hussain admittedly left at exactly the right time)? Did we hear the term experimentation being shouted from the rooftops? Good decisions have been made, but let us not glorify them.

Our cricket is not alone in this regard. On a recent show on one of India's premier TV news channels, there was a vote for the person whom fellow Bangaloreans would be most proud to call a Bangalorean. The great Physicist CV Raman and poor old Vishwesharaiya never figured in the list that was handed to the voters.

Do not get me wrong. Dravid and Chappell are doing a very good job (Dravid's field placings for instance in the one-dayers have been more well thought-out than Ganguly's, and Chappell has been a good influence on young batsmen), I'd at times be happier though if they acknowledged theirs was just a logical conclusion, an evolution, of a process that was started a while back, by Ganguly and Wright. We as a nation, shall be much the better for some proper perspective. And, perhaps then, we shall enjoy our successes even more.

Postscript: The supposed downswing in the test graph is not really a downswing as Dileep correctly points out in his piece on Wicket-to-wicket. Our batting helped us tide over a lack of penetration in bowling, but batting can help you win tests only so much.