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Hail the Prince of Calcutta

Somehow, as I heard of the news of Saurav Ganguly becoming the captain of the Indian cricket team, I felt good. Something inside me said that this is what Indian cricket needed to make it turn the corner and make its way back to the top.

No, it is not his graceful batting that makes me feel so confident. If a good batsman were to be a good captain, Tendulkar would be the undisputed captain No 1. It is more of a mental make up of the individual that makes or breaks a captain, and I have a feeling that Ganguly will make rather than break.

A captain is perhaps the most important person in the team, even if he is not the best batsman, the best bowler or the best fielder in the side. He is so important because he can take a set of individuals and make then into one unit. A good captain can plan like a general does in war and make optimum use of his manpower. See the shortcomings and the strength and make adjustments accordingly. Someone who has a sharp brain and more importantly a person who commands enough respect from the others and makes them perform, getting the person to adjust to the requirements rather than adjusting the requirements to the person.

Sometimes a captain has to see a role for a player in a team that even that player himself does not see for himself. Then get him to adjust the role and give it his best shot. That is where Sachin failed and that is where I feel Ganguly will succeed. All players are grown up men with their own line of thinking and reason. Sometimes it is a difficult thing to tell others something and that is where a captain has to have that special something that makes him a good captain. This Indian team, man for man, is probably better than the Australian team and the South African team but nevertheless no one will bet his hard-earned money on their winning against these teams. The reason being that the Indian cricket team plays with such a fixed pattern of play, with no variations, that it is becoming easier for the opposition to predict the game plan of the Indians.

We have bowlers, batsmen and fielders who have remained so for a long time. The bowlers have made no strides in attaining even pygmy status as batsmen, having enough gumption to score ten runs per head. The batsmen do not turn their hand over, even though people like Tendulkar, Azhar, Jadeja and Ganguly have it in them to be far more regular bowlers than they have been till date.

The fielders who have been ordinary for so long are still ordinary. There comes the change and adjustment that the captain can bring about with the sheer weight of his being the captain, the top dog, the general. After all what use is a general when the troops have their own gameplan to fight the enemy. The captain must make the players listen to him, discuss strategies with them, fix roles for each and nurse the player along that line. Getting more out of a player than even he thinks he can give is the sign of an excellent captain.

Ganguly went to Australia in 1992 and came back a laughing stock. He went to England again in 1996, a surprise inclusion uncharitably associated with proper connections rather than the proper talent or merit. He came back the toast of Indian cricket, the new future. With that century at Lord's, he signaled to the world that he was ready to get up when hit, hit back and with vigor. He hasn't looked back since and that shows the enormous mental strength of the man. That brings me to the reason why I think he will be a good captain.

Sachin and Azhar were mentally tough too, the toughness of the former being evident since his debut as a teenager and that of the latter being so evident as of late in the way he clawed his way back into the team through his sheer tenacity and good form in domestic cricket though obituaries had been written in the media about his cricketing days.

But Azhar and Tendulkar have not seen that failure that Ganguly has seen, never been the spectre of ridicule that Ganguly was after that 1992 tour. Howsoever much the pressure, I doubt Ganguly will feel the way he did after that forgettable debut. Which makes me doubly sure he will make sure a scenario such as that does not occur. Having seen the depths, he will not want to see them again. Ganguly is a man who, one suspects, will not take kindly to defeat.

Sachin was not able to get his players to do what he wanted them to do because maybe he was too lenient with them. A nice guy. One suspects that being in that plane a few rungs above the average player, he tried to reach down to the level of that player, rather than making the player reach upto his level. Sometimes a player needs to be goaded and reprimanded as well as advised and praised and one suspects that Ganguly will not hesitate to sound out anyone who takes his job less than seriously.

Ganguly is himself an example of a man who adjusts all the time. His onside play, sometime back the weak point of his otherwise graceful batting, is now a weapon in his armory. His bowling, which Geoffery Boycott somewhere in the beginning used to compare to his grandmother's, is a useful tool, offering variety and flexibility to the Indian attack. Even his fielding and running between the wickets, though not exactly of the Rhodes class, has come a long way from the Ganguly of a couple of seasons back. A person who keeps on changing with the times, a person who can inspire people to do the same.

When a person has to face failure due to his own shortcomings, he can adjust to the fact. When his failure is due to the shortcomings of others, it is a bit harder to take. That is what happened to Tendulkar. He tried to take the load of the others in the team as well and they let him take that extra load. He perhaps was aware of the shortcomings of his teammates but he tried to cover for them by his own brilliance. He performed but then one can never fight against eleven. As failure after failure was encountered, he gave himself more responsibility rather than distributing it more evenly among his teammates. The result was a Tendulkar who towards the end of the Australian tour was most un-Tendulkar like, giving worn out excuses about the schedules and looking extremely unhappy to be on the cricket field.

The players were too shameless to share the responsibility with their leader and the leader was too nice to tell them to. One cannot see Ganguly sitting quietly, taking the blame for others' incompetence and burdening himself with their responsibility as well. Ganguly is a sharp cricketer and a good sportsman but he is also someone who will not hesitate to call a spade a spade. His recent statements about the selectors keeping out of the decision of choosing the final eleven, is an example of a man who is not afraid to voice his opinion.

A captain must, like Ranatunga did for Muralitharan in that hair-raising episode of no-balling, totally support his players. But that is different from taking the fall for the other players. On the outside, yes, a captain has to be the fall guy for any bad performances. But on the inside, he can do more good than harm by distributing the blame among his teammates. After all, doesn't team work and unity mean following the principle of "all for one and one for all".

In the popular TV series of yesteryears "Star Trek", the captain introduces himself as "James D Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise". The voice says it all. I am the captain, the iron in the voice says, and don't anyone forget it. Similarly a captain of the cricket team also has to have the respect of his teammates and though being a team man himself, must never let the respect go, even in jest and friendship. All this does not mean being a dictator in the pure sense of the word but a bit of dictatorship is a must for good leadership.

Ganguly has it in him to be that dictator leader that Steve Waugh is to the Australians, Cronje is to the South Africans, Ranatunga was to the Sri Lankans in their heydays and Wasim Akram to the Pakistanis. Under him, one feels, this Indian team will reinvent itself even though it may take some time for that to happen.

As Sachin gives up the seat to the Prince of Calcutta, all we can say is "The king is dead, all hail the King".