For today’s governing elites, only success matters and when it happens, they’re quick to bask in the reflected glory and share the limelight with the champions. Recall Narendra Modi’s fawning over our triumphant T-20 cricket world champions a few months ago. But when defeat comes calling, calculating opportunists often scurry away.
The recent twin defeats of India’s test cricket team to New Zealand and Australia have sparked a cynical outcry, fuelled by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and former cricketers’ unseemly reactions. How dare they? You don’t kick anybody, least of all, our heroes when they are down. But that’s what our wonderful cricket team has had to face since our test series defeat to Australia last month. When they were most in need of empathy and understanding, they were greeted with brickbats.
Instead of rushing in where angels fear to tread, let’s step back and look at our team’s performance in perspective before passing judgement. It’s a fact that in the last three months, we lost 0-3 to New Zealand and 1-3 to Australia. But this bland statistic obscures how exciting and nail bitingly close most of the games were.
Against New Zealand, the first test was lost on the first morning when India was bowled out for 46 runs on a devilishly lively Chepauk wicket, and despite the second innings heroics of Sarfraz Khan and Rishabh Pant, New Zealand won the game handily. But in the next two tests, the pendulum swung maddeningly to and fro with New Zealand ultimately prevailing by 113 runs in Pune and by 25 runs at the Wankhede.
Likewise in Australia, India lost the series but, thanks primarily to our lion-hearted bowlers led by the peerless Jasprit Bumrah, put up a sterling fight. Don’t underrate our thumping victory in the first test where the victory margin of 295 runs is the most comprehensive ever by an Indian team in Australia. Sadly, as happens even to the best, our vaunted batting line-up, barring Yashasvi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant, couldn’t get going. India lost the series but was gallant in defeat.
And lest we forget, this very Indian team spearheaded by Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Bumrah and Ravichandran Ashwin is our most successful ever. Since 2019, India has won 31 of the 59 tests played and lost 19. India was the runners-up in the 2023 one day international (ODI) World Cup, reached the final of the World Test Championship 2024 and won the T-20 World Cup 2024. Beat that.
It’s sickening to see these heroes who have given their all for the country are now being crucified by men “dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what (they’re) most assured of.” The BCCI, as graphically described by a leading national daily, “cracks whip to fix team India, issues strict disciplinary guidelines to rein in the players.”
Among the directives issued are juvenile fiats that include staying for the entire duration of practice sessions, travelling to and from venues together, making participation in domestic matches mandatory, allowing only restricted time with families, barring personal advertisement shoots during series/tours but making it mandatory to be available for “BCCI’s official shoots, promotional activities and functions.”
The laundry list of dos and don’ts is an insult to team India, and particularly to the seniors like Kohli and Sharma – at whom the barbs are aimed. Asking these battle-hardened heroes to go back to the basics reminded me of arguably the greatest actor of all time, Marlon Brando, being asked to do a screen test before he was offered the role in The Godfather. Even at this distant date, I remember Time magazine’s droll comment: “It was like asking the Pope to recite his catechism.”
The shabby treatment of guys who have achieved so much for the country is unconscionable. The absurd BCCI diktat treats our heroes like errant schoolboys, ignoring the reality of their high-pressure lives, playing and travelling day in and out. Never have we had a more professional and fitter group of senior cricketers than we have today. And to subject them to this kind of schoolboy inquisition? What a shame.
Maybe, it’s too much to expect the puny men in the BCCI to show understanding or empathy with our cricketers. But one could not have imagined that our former cricketers like the oracular Sunil Gavaskar and Sanjay Manjrekar would join the lynch mob like they did. In the wake of our team’s defeat in the fifth test at Sydney, Gavaskar set the cat among the pigeons by urging the board “to stop acting like admirers and put their foot down…We don’t need players who are partly here and partly elsewhere. It’s time to stop pampering anyone.”
Due to the forgetfulness and hypocrisy, one feels like yelling “foul!” To Gavaskar’s credit, he was the first Indian cricketer who demonstrated that enormous financial benefits through ads and appearance fees could be reaped as collateral to his craft. And why not, considering the all too brief shelf life of a professional cricketer.
I am ancient enough to remember that at that time too, in the late 1980s, former cricketers like Bishen Singh Bedi and Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi made snide comments about Gavaskar and Kapil Dev for having “too many distractions and they all revolve around money,” and for being “commercial, not professional.” Then too, the criticism seemed outrageously unfair as it was levelled against two stalwarts who, irrespective of their other preoccupations, were the quintessential professionals devoted to their craft. It ill behoves Gavaskar to now do unto Kohli and Sharma what was done to him. One expected a more measured and empathetic response to team India’s recent defeats from our greatest ever batsman.
While Gavaskar played petty politics, Greg Chappell, a modern great and deep thinker of the game, brilliantly and empathetically analysed the plight of our aging stars and what he calls “Elite Performance Decline Syndrome (EPDS).” The fear of failure results in hesitation and self-doubt. Consequently, fearlessness is replaced by caution, self-doubt, physical and mental fatigue. There is also the overpowering emotional toll of carrying the weight of expectations of one billion fans. Chappell suggests that the only cure is “to rekindle the thinking of your youth,” though he admits that it is easier said than done.
India is a front runner to win the Champions Trophy commencing later this month – a tribute to their outstanding performance in the one-day format. At this crunch time, one hopes that our heroes have overcome the demoralising effect of dealing with an iniquitous cricket establishment. And let’s pray that our heroes, Kohli and Sharma, end on a high note and echo Chappell’s thoughts at the end of his final test when he scored a century: “Time may diminish our powers; it cannot erase the habits of excellence ingrained over a lifetime!”
Mathew John is a former civil servant. The views are personal.
