(Photo: Getty Images)
By Dileep Premachandran
It was a moment so taut with tension that it could have been from Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing exploration of a collapsing relationship in Scenes From A Marriage. It was November 2006, a day before India played South Africa at St. George’s Park in Port Elizabeth.
The ODI series had begun in awful fashion, with the tourists already 2-0 down. The optimism of the first year of Greg Chappell’s tenure as coach was fast receding, and in more ways than one, this was a team under siege, with morale lower than it had been since the match-fixing scandal of 2000.
A fellow journalist and I were in Chappell’s room at the team hotel. He had opted not to take the team bus to practice, so that he could field a phone call from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Back home, TV channels and newspapers were abuzz about how Chappell was losing the team, and how a one-time band of brothers was now split down the middle between those with allegiance to the coach, and others that wanted him gone.
Chappell, a man who could talk passionately and at length about the sport he had graced three decades earlier, was clearly on edge. When he did eventually pick up the phone, his responses were almost monosyllabic. When he hung up, he turned to us and said just three words: “He’s back.”
The “he” in question was Sourav Ganguly, instrumental in Chappell being chosen as coach, but deposed as captain within a couple of months of him taking over. The Chappell-Ganguly feud was the ugliest Indian cricket had seen, and its after-effects were being felt more than a year later.
When Ganguly eventually arrived, in time for a pre-Test series tune-up in Potchefstroom, the two exchanged a handshake as ginger as that which two South African-born English batsmen exchanged after Textgate more than half a decade later. Ganguly would go on to be India’s leading run-scorer in a 2-1 loss. Three months later, after India crashed out of the World Cup in the first round, Chappell walked away from a contract that still had a couple of months to run.
For India, after all the sky-high expectations that had followed Chappell’s appointment, it was a reminder of how precarious the coach-captain relationship could be. For a decade, India had relied on their own stalwarts to guide the team. Bishan Singh Bedi, once of Wantage Road, had threatened to throw the players in the Pacific Ocean on a particularly bad day, while Ajit Wadekar – who led India to a first series win in England in 1971 – and Mohammed Azharuddin proved an unbeatable combination at home.
But India’s haplessness abroad, encapsulated by the 100 and 66 all out in Durban in 1996-97, and a 3-0 evisceration in Australia in 1999-2000 – when Kapil Dev’s brand of coaching largely consisted of exhortations to “play for the country” – prompted the board to look overseas for someone who could do the kind of job that Bob Woolmer had done for South Africa, and Bob Simpson and Geoff Marsh for Australia.
Thanks in no small measure to a glowing recommendation from Rahul Dravid, who had worked with him at Kent, John Wright got the job. The first four years of his tenure were marked by steady progress – with that epic 2001 series win against Steve Waugh’s Invincibles and a World Cup final appearance (2003) the highlights.
But by the time he left in the summer of 2005, Wright’s once-harmonious relationship with Ganguly, below, had started to fray.
In a bar in Visakhapatnam during his farewell series, he spoke candidly to a small group of journalists about how he felt Ganguly had taken the team as far as he could, and how Dravid, with his impeccable work ethic, was the man to take it forward.
Chappell, though he owed his job largely to Ganguly’s preference, soon arrived at the same conclusion. Burned by the Chappell experience, India were understandably hesitant about appointing another high-profile name. There was no coach in charge when they toured England and beat their hosts 1-0 in the summer of 2007. Gary Kirsten came on board only in early 2008, and was temperamentally Butch Cassidy to Chappell’s Sundance Kid.
Unlike Chappell, who loved fronting up to the cameras – the transcript of his media interaction after India’s Test win at The Wanderers in 2006 ran to over 9,000 words – Kirsten preferred life on the fringes. When the team did well, he was rarely seen. When they flopped, he would invariably front up, and defend even the biggest underperformers to the hilt.
More importantly, he made little attempt to shift India’s superstars from their comfort zones, something Chappell had tried and failed to do. The players’ faith in Kirsten was near absolute. He was coach, Man Friday and best friend rolled into one.
Duncan Fletcher, his successor, was given something of a hospital pass, with Kirsten leaving behind a leg-weary team in decline. His first major assignment, against his former wards in England, saw India thrashed 4-0. When the next trip to the old country saw another defeat (3-1), the BCCI decided to act.
Fletcher’s work with the younger batsmen was seen as especially valuable – after all, the great Jacques Kallis swore by him – but Ravi Shastri was drafted in as team director to renew a side that had slumped to mid-table in all forms of the game.
His tracer-bullet persona on TV won’t tell you how astute a thinker Shastri is. In his playing days, a flamboyant lifestyle – including an affair with a Bollywood actress – went against him being appointed captain, with the job going to a succession of individuals who didn’t have a smidgen of the nous he possessed.
As team director, he quickly established robust relationships. He wasn’t a soft touch, but away from match play and practice, he was more friend and mentor than a figure of authority. When Virat Kohli was put through the wringer for his liaison with an actress after each poor result India suffered, Shastri, who had endured similar abuse, was best placed to offer advice and solace.
With both men also in sync when it came to their belief on how the game should be played – the metaphorical front foot, at all times – it was more than a surprise when Shastri’s contract was not renewed after the World T20 in 2016.
At the time, with Anil Kumble getting the job, Shastri told me of his disappointment, and compared it to a mango tree being cut down before it could bear fruit.
Kumble began by saying that he would function like an elder brother, but by the end of an enormously successful 12-month stint, the whispers were more of a Big Brother-style of functioning. The results on the field were better than they had ever been, but he and Kohli never gave the impression that they were conjoined at the hip, as his predecessor had been.
When Kumble eventually resigned after India’s defeat in the Champions Trophy final, Shastri wasn’t even on the list of those that had applied for the job. But Kohli, who now leads in all formats after MS Dhoni gave up the white-ball captaincy in early 2017, made his preference very clear, and the deadline for interested candidates to apply was extended so that Shastri could send in his application.
The minute he did, there was no mistaking his confidence. Instead of coming back to India after his Champions Trophy commitments to buttress his claims, Shastri stayed on in the UK, enjoying the tennis at Wimbledon and downtime with old friends. And though the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) comprising Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman that eventually appointed Shastri recommended new support staff, the main man soon made it clear that he would make that call.
In essence, Indian cricket is back to April 2016, with the captain getting his coach of choice. Despite what happened to Ganguly more than a decade ago, the Shastri-Kohli partnership is unlikely to fray at the edges any time soon. The elder man’s admiration for Kohli’s focus is demonstrable, while the younger enjoys having a sounding board with a wealth of experience who understands that it’s the captain’s team.
There is considerable sympathy for Kumble, the greatest cricketer India has produced, and the Kohli-Shastri combine will be subject to the most intense scrutiny in the months ahead, especially when they embark on tours of South Africa, England and Australia.
Both captain and coach reckon India now have a team capable of winning in all conditions. If they do, the unpleasantness of the last couple of months will be quickly forgotten. But should they slip up, the axe will drop swiftly. And this time, it will be two heads that roll.
