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S Sreesanth was always an emotionally vulnerable man almost fatally attracted to self-destruction but that he could combust so spectacularly still surprises one. And therein lies the sad tale of Shantakumaran Sreesanth. Everyone expected something silly, even stupid, from him, but this? It's impossible for me to say whether the 30-year-old is innocent or guilty but it's a cautionary tale for the cricketing establishment to take greater care of immature young talents.
Here was a young man whose human awkwardness and emotional inadequacy always made you wonder about him. It was clear that he was a tormented soul who craved for attention and it bewildered him initially why no one in the cricketing fraternity really liked him. Later, he began to feel victimised about everything and started to sulk - his natural state of being for some years now. Did that emotional alienation push him into a state of personal hell, where he couldn't bother anymore about the morality of his deeds?
Sreesanth was never a saint - most of us aren't - but nothing however quite prepared one for this slip into the abyss. At worst he came across as a self-absorbed kid who was bent on self-destruction, but it never occurred to anyone that he could be involved in matchfixing. That raises interesting questions about cricketing personalities that one would think of as capable of fixing and about the stereotypes that reside in our skull, but that's a topic for another day.
The stories that one usually heard about Sreesanth were never malicious; he would come across as an annoying pest at times but that's about it. He spent his early days at the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai and his fellow junior cricketers tell a story of a boy mischievously eager to please his seniors. When coaches, like TA Sekhar, would come into the room at the end of a training session, Sreesanth, who would be resting, would jump up and, in a player's words, "act" as if he is doing some training ritual. "We used to call him an actor," says the player.
He reminded one of a kid who would visit your house and, without much prompting, break into a song-and-dance routine in an over-eager attempt to show off his talent, and who would soak up the adulation of the elders. That kid can be occasionally annoying and irritating but it's difficult to see any real evil in him. Sreesanth was like that kid, or so it seemed.
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The one thing that was certain was that he carried a sense of victimhood. Over the years, it has only strengthened. Initially, it was about how he didn't have any godfather in Indian cricket and how his background from Kochi in Kerala meant no one really took him seriously. Later, it grew into a persecution complex.
It's fair to say that Sreesanth always cut a lonely figure in the Indian cricketing fraternity. Some people don't mind that anonymity but Sreesanth wasn't one of them. He craved attention, a shoulder to lean on, a back to slap, hands that would applaud and eyes that would cherish him, but all he got was a shrug of indifference and back-chats of ridicule.
One remembers summery afternoons at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore where he was undergoing rehab. A casual chat would often turn bitter. "Not one cricketer, my teammates, has called me or messaged me about how I am doing. No one really cares. I always enquired about other teammates when they were in trouble." He was also, understandably, upset about how the entire Harbhajan Singh slap saga ran in the public mind (Singh had appeared to slap Sreesanth after an IPL match in 2008).
It's not as if the alienation was completely one-way, though, for he too had slowly started to withdraw into a cocoon of his own. A couple of years ago, beside a swimming pool in a hotel room in the West Indies, Ishant Sharma was talking about teammates whom he hangs around with. Unprompted, he talked of Sreesanth, who, he said, didn't mingle much and with whom he had rarely had a chat. "It's not that he is a bad guy, but just someone I have never got to know." Does he help you with bowling tips or something? "No. I rarely interact with him." So does he have any friend? "Akele hi rehta hai woh, apne duniya mey (He stays alone, in his own world)."
The Kochi bowler was slightly bitter about things, but that doesn't mean he was bereft of humour. Even self-deprecation would feature in his tales. He would tell the story of how his sledging of Brian Lara backfired alarmingly. "I beat him with the ball a couple of times and then walked down the track and said, 'Is this Brian Charles Lara or some imposter?' Have you seen that ground in the West Indies where there is a small church beyond the midwicket boundary? The next ball, I bowled slightly short and the ball landed in that church." And he laughed like a kid as he recounted the tale.
There was also this incident with the blogger who called himself the Fake IPL Player. The blogger had perfectly sensed, and enhanced, Sreesanth's public image of being an object of ridicule. In his infamous blog, Anupam Mukherjee, later revealed as the man behind the Fake IPL Player, had named Sreesanth the "Appam Chu...". During the same tournament, this writer had asked Sreesanth about that tag. Though the bowler denied knowledge about the blog's existence, he nevertheless was curious about the name given to him by the blogger. And when he was told what it was, he laughed and said, "Well, at least both parts are eatable!"
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Often, over the years, Sreesanth's inner conflict and battle over his public persona would emerge. He obviously didn't like how he was viewed by fellow cricketers and public and would give interviews about how he was going to change his bad-boy image and reform. That he would behave better on the field, that he would not indulge in the histrionics he was infamous for and how he was a changed man. Within a month or two, he would say he had to revert to his "natural self" - that he shouldn't control his natural instincts and that he had to be his own self.
The big question was, of course, whether he was aware of his real self anymore. He was always trying to either reinvent himself or trying to re-discover himself, but the bigger process, one felt, that was eluding him, was finding himself. Not many of us do in our own lives and here was a vulnerable youngster, not equipped with emotional quotient, thrown into the turmoil of international cricket that throws up fame, money, and creates celebrities out of people, not quite capable of handling it.
"I know I am tagged with lots of negative publicity. All I can assure every cricket follower in India is that when it comes to playing, and preparing, I am as disciplined and dedicated as anyone else. All I am asking is that they keep faith in me," he once said, while describing his tattoo which had the text 'Faith' inscribed in Chinese. It looks ironic now.
Everyone who has come across Sreesanth, or even seen him on television and read about him in papers, knew that he needed a mentor. Of all the Indian captains that he played under, it was probably Rahul Dravid who tried the most to get the best out of him. And it's utterly ironic, and cruel, that it was under Dravid's watch that Sreesanth crossed the line that should never have been breached.
(Sriram Veera is a cricket-writer for Mumbai Mirror)
