Jai Arjun Singh: Keep it simple, coach

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If the toughest job in modern-day cricket is captaining the Indian team, being the coach must be a distant second "" especially if you're a foreigner, aware that you're being closely watched by millions of cricket-worshippers, half of whom are eyeing you with distrust, the other half expecting you to turn the team into an Australia overnight.

Not only do you have to show the results (and even that isn't always enough), you have to demonstrate to a cricket-obsessed country that you're doing things the previous guy never thought of.

So if John Wright arranged special screenings of inspirational sports films (like Remember the Titans) for Ganguly and the boys, Greg Chappell "" dapper former Australian captain, one of the most graceful batsmen of the 1970s and now India's cricket coach "" must go two steps further.

Chappell has thrown his hat into the ring; in fact, he's thrown in six of them. He's using the services of a master-trainer of the Edward de Bono school of "lateral thinking" and the "six-thinking-hat technique" to help enhance the skills of the Indian cricketers.

De Bono, incidentally, is a new-age guru whose pearls of wisdom on cricket include the following observation: "If the objective is to take wickets to win the game, we must decide not to take any wickets...it opens up different channels to look at the game."

All this spiel is partly a by-product of modern sport, where coaching techniques must be "out of the box" and where sticking to the basics is never quite enough. But it's unfortunate that a former cricketer of Greg Chappell's stature has to take recourse to such meretricious training methods "" one would think he could simply draw on his own considerable experience as player and captain.

As captain and player, Chappell was less flamboyant than his brother Ian but he led by example, scoring centuries in each innings of his first Test in charge. He handled the dual responsibility of being his team's skipper and best batsman with aplomb "" an experience that could be very relevant to the current Indian side if Rahul Dravid becomes captain for the long haul (as is widely expected).

Chappell also knows a thing or two about the pressures and pitfalls of superstardom, which is where he could be the right man to talk to Sachin Tendulkar. And though a quiet, contemplative player himself, he was part of a team that brought the term "Ugly Australian" into popular usage "" which means he knows how to dish it out when necessary.

Most vitally, he has a cricketing pedigree that can't be faulted; every member of the Indian team respects him for his achievements on the field. That gives him an authority even de Bono, with all his thinking hats, can't compete with.