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Oh Captain, My Captain!

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Arghya Ganguly

Arghya Ganguly tries to shed light on some of the theories about Sachin Tendulkar’s unsuccessful stint as the India captain.

Sachin TendulkarSome things in sports will always remain a mystery. Did Sonny Liston really get knocked unconscious by Muhammad Ali’s “phantom” punch in 1965, or did Liston, rumoured to be controlled by underworld forces, bet against himself, and take a dive? Is Lance Armstrong the greatest ever to ride a bicycle or the most cunning EPO-user? (Erythropoetin, or EPO, is a performance-enhancing drug.) Why does Roger Federer’s artistry disintegrate when he sees the biceps-strutting Spaniard Rafael Nadal on the other side of the net? Similarly, the grey area in Indian cricket, for the past decade-and-half, has been the failure of Sachin Tendulkar as a skipper.

 

Tendulkar, who captained the national side twice in the 1990s, has an abysmal record of 16 per cent wins in 25 Test matches. In comparison, Mohammad Azharuddin has just below 30 per cent wins; Sourav Ganguly has 43 per cent wins; and M S Dhoni has 44.38 per cent wins. Even captains who came before Tendulkar fare better — Sunil Gavaskar had 19.14 per cent wins and Kapil Dev 44.11 per cent wins.

In one-day internationals, Tendulkar’s record is not much better — he has won only 35 per cent of his 73 matches as in-charge compared to Gavaskar’s 37.83 per cent, Kapil’s 52.7 per cent, Azhar’s 54.1 per cent, Ganguly’s 53.9 per cent, and Dhoni’s 57.14 per cent.

Keen observers of the game have offered theories galore on why Tendulkar as a leader appeared a lost little boy in the woods. While some said it was his inability to administer the coup de grace when the opponent was under the cosh, others opined that he under-bowled himself. There were other factors too which cold statistics don’t convey: three of the greatest batsmen — Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, and V V S Laxman — were in their first international season when Tendulkar took over for the first time in 1996 and their inexperience would’ve proved an encumbrance.

History would also show that Tendulkar had to negotiate tough tours in South Africa, West Indies and Australia with a team of average players like Vikram Rathore, Dodda Ganesh, David Johnson, M S K Prasad etc. “One quality of Tendulkar that was good or bad, depending on how you look at it, was that he expected 110 per cent from his players. And when his players didn’t deliver, he was disappointed. Somehow, he failed to come to terms with that aspect,” says Anshuman Gaekwad who was coach of the team when Tendulkar was captain.

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In his recently-published book I Was There — Memoirs of a Cricket Administrator, Jaywant Lele, a former secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, tries to demystify theories about Tendulkar’s unsuccessful stint, using empirical evidence. Describing him as “shy and cultured gentleman” Lele explains that Tendulkar’s “habit of respecting elders” even if he knew they were wrong worked against him as skipper during the 1999-2000 home-series. “The subject of match-fixing was riding very high at that time. It was a Test match in Ahmedabad against New Zealand. India had put on a mammoth total of 583 runs in the first innings against which the visitors could post only 308. Everyone expected India to impose a follow-on,” writes Lele. And, as expected, Tendulkar went to the captain of the opposition, Stephen Fleming, and told him that they had to bat again. He asked the umpires to show a few balls to opening bowlers. That’s when Kapil Dev intervened and asked him to reverse his decision because “our bowlers are tired”. “Okay, but I have already told them that we are enforcing a follow-on,” Tendulkar is believed to have told Dev, to which the 1983 World Cup-winning captain replied: “So what? Tell them we are changing the decision. They will agree.”

Cricket aficionados will recollect that early this year, speaking at a convention of leaders, Kapil had elucidated (what Lele indicates in his memoir) that Tendulkar failed because he wouldn’t speak up. “Sachin couldn’t indicate with the selectors ‘I want these boys in my team’. The difficult part was he was composed (sic.) to himself totally. And we used to say Sachin you should go and ask. But he felt ‘I can’t ask them, they should know’,” Dev had said.

What if the captain in 1999-2000 had been Dhoni? “Would he have tamely agreed with Kapil Dev’s order that the follow-on should not be imposed upon? The answer, plainly, is that he would not have. Dhoni would very much have acted as the forceful captain and insisted on the follow-on. We might say, consequently, that Tendulkar represents a different era of cricket, one in which Indians had not yet fully learned to exercise the killer instinct,” says Prof Vinay Lal, a lecturer of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Lele also says that he found Tendulkar gullible in other instances as well. Tendulkar had backed the inclusion in the national team of Nilesh Kulkarni who had been recommended to him, without knowing that Kulkarni had been dropped by his own Ranji Trophy team and therefore “cut a sorry figure” in the selection committee meeting. Additionally, Lele claims that Tendulkar, unable to deal with criticism after South Africa beat India in Mumbai in 2000, tendered his resignation. The then BCCI chief Raj Singh Dungarpur and Ravi Shastri tried to convince Tendulkar but failed. Tendulkar’s wife Anjali finally convinced him to stay on till the end of the two-match series.

What emerges then from these shards of information provided by peripheral characters — not very clearly, of course, since the man himself hasn’t spoken yet — is that although Tendulkar’s career coincides with the emergence of a globally resurgent India, the “Little Master’s” personality, unlike that of many other Indians, wasn’t much influenced by the economic liberalisation. Yes, he was fervently competitive and ambitious, but he lacked — although we adored him for the same — the self-assertion, ruthlessness and irreverence of the common man of the 1990s, that resulted partly from the “new money” that he earned from the newly opened-up trade and investment. To be a world-beater, Tendulkar, the cricketing genius, would have had to assume some of the combativeness of the common man during his six hours on the field.

Perhaps he could have learnt from the legendary English captain Douglas Jardine who was born 73-years before him in Malabar Hill, south Bombay. Jardine had a dual personality, one for the field and the another off the field, which was evident when he came to Bombay in 1933-34. The day before the first Test in Bombay Jardine accompanied his father’s butler, Lalla Sebastian, to the Sewrie cemetery. The butler wished to offer prayers to his relatives. “Which student or participant of bodyline would be prepared for Jardine taking time out to accompany his butler to a cemetery in between parties?” asks Ramachandra Guha in A Corner of a Foreign Field. Off the field, Jardine displayed “canny wit and gifts for fellowship”, while being “the first to lead the reaction against Edwardian gesture and romance and the humbug of may the best side win”.

Tendulkar would have had to go from being a “gentleman par excellence” to using the “Jardinian theory” to survive as a skipper. But had he done that, perhaps, we Indian fans would’ve been disappointed with him and Tendulkar, very conscious of his image, knew this. As Tendulkar-fanatics, we wanted him to be true to his nature all the time, and the “Master” obliged. Did he then become as good (or as bad) a captain as people let him be? Who knows?

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First Published: Nov 05 2011 | 12:07 AM IST

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