Hussain hogs the captaincy accolades

The recent India-England series outlined the differences in the thinking process between Sourav Ganguly and Nasser Hussain. The hosts were not unduly worried about the visiting team, since they were without their best players. Some of the leading English stars had pulled out of this tour due to personal reasons, and with Graham Thorpe returning to England after the first Test, Hussain's team was further depleted. Mind you, their performance at Mohali was not encouraging, to say the least, but this is where Hussain, as a visiting captain, showed great enterprise in keeping his inexperienced side on track.

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Hussain was completely aware of his team's strengths and weaknesses, and it would be fair to say that the weaknesses outweighed the strengths. Yet he was faced with the task of reviving morale and inspiring his team to do better than its best. The bowling looked thin without the likes of Darren Gough and Andrew Caddick, and the spinners - Ashley Giles and Richard Dawson - hardly lookied capable of running through a side. The top-order England batsmen too looked lost against spinners, especially on the dusty tracks in India. Apart from all these concerns, Hussain also had to formulate a game plan to put it across the hosts.

The uncompromising toughness and individuality of Hussain landed him in trouble with the Essex management some years ago, but ironically those very attributes won him accolades on this tour. He always was in charge of proceedings and never allowed the game to drift. His bowlers were told to stick to his plans, and they were utilised in the best manner possible. Andrew Flintoff has come a long way as a bowler on this tour, and Matthew Hoggard looks a very good prospect for the future. Furthermore, Hussain simply did not bother to think about the prospect of being criticised for his tactics. The visiting captain may not have scored big runs, but this did not deter him from leading the team with an iron hand. It is at times when things are not going well that the character of a cricketer is severely tested and, based on what Hussain has done, he has passed with flying colours.

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On the other hand, Sourav Ganguly was definitely not in the best of form with the bat, and this resulted in him being slightly hesitant throughout the series. A captain has to keep track of a lot of issues, and when personal form is poor, there is every chance of haziness creeping into the mind. The spinners were expected to bowl the visitors out without too much fuss; they did that well enough, but the batsmen were the ones to be blamed. In a way, Ganguly's gang was puzzled by Hussain's tactics. Ganguly may not come out openly and say so, but one got the impression that he did not get his choice of medium pacers. Even so, it was a shame that the visitors were allowed to call the shots in the second and third Tests.

The lesson to be learnt from this series is that Ganguly should try to utilise the resources on hand rather than brood over the absence of his choices. This is where Hussain showed that inexperienced bowlers can do the job as long as they enjoy the skipper's confidence. This has not been Ganguly's problem alone; the same mindset prevailed in the case of his predecessors as well. To add to his woes, the visiting team's medium pacers zeroed in on Ganguly, and it was clear that he succumbed to pressures that were mounted on him from all directions. It just goes to show that, regardless of experience, pressure has a sinister knack of having the final say.

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