Jhakas | Sanjay Jha
What you instantly like about the Black Cap skipper besides his deep baritone voice is his spontaneous, pugnacious demeanour. On being questioned on the differing capabilities of India’s current captain and his immediate predecessor, Stephen Fleming did not flinch in any perceptible discomfort. Unlike many others astutely groomed in answering in diplomatic non-committal jargon, Fleming called a shovel a shovel. In simple terms, he called Sourav Ganguly, emotional, confrontational, passionate. Rahul Dravid by sheer contrast was measured, calculating and methodical according to the most-capped captain in ODI history. The contradictions in leadership styles of Dravid and Ganguly is sunshine stark; not just as different as chalk and cheese, but chalk and ink.
The purists may go fly a coloured kite in this clear October-blue sky, but I thought Ganguly’s attempt at showing us his arm muscles and bare chest at the Lord’s balcony in the Natwest finals, was a fitting riposte to Andrew Flintoff’s gesture of waving his red-blue jersey at Wankhede Satdium not long before, which had levelled the ODI series. In fact, when I took my kids for the traditional Lord’s Stadium tourist visit in London recently, Sourav’s chest-thumping patriotism in that celebrated balcony was what they instinctively recollected. That was Sourav Ganguly -- a person today callously consigned to canned cheers for India in the Champions Trophy 2006 for a cola ad, even as Suresh Raina tries to figure out his middle stump from his hind legs, and Mohammad Kaif impresses us more with runs saved than runs scored. Continue reading below
Ganguly’s captaincy cannot be correctly evaluated by mere statistics alone. He inherited the key mantle under intriguing circumstances; Sachin Tendulkar, batting genius apart, had discovered that it was one thing to be India’s blue-eyed batting wonder and sheer anchor-in-perpetuity, and totally another to lead an assortment of men, each possessing both high talent and indecipherable human frailties. Navjot Sidhu, Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Mohammed Azharrudin -- Sachin had realised that he may be the next best thing to happen after Sir Don Bradman, but captaincy was as beyond him as common sense is to my perennial whipping boy George Bush.
I still remember the dark days of match-fixing, as I was right there in the central focus of the international arena where the sordid breaking news on Hansie Cronje and his several cohorts first surfaced making Sanjeev Chawla more famous than SRK. We were at the Sheraton Hotel (????) in Dhaka, just about to address a press conference about the Cricketnext.com Cup match between Asia XI and the Rest of World XI in April 2000 when the then ICC President Jagmohan Dalmiya confirmed rumours that the Delhi police had seized some incriminating tapes which was to permanently alter the core character of the game forever.
Sourav assumed captaincy in these rather testing times; an Indian team which was admittedly rudderless, and the game itself which looked headed ominously towards doomsday. I believe Ganguly gave the Indian team a bold direction by deliberately assuming the devil-may-care attitude, almost thriving in being anti-conventional and challenging traditional expectations. His aggressive attitude rubbed off brilliantly on the young-blood in the Indian camp, hungry for some attacking dimension -- principally, Virendra Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan.
As Ganguly led India to the finals of the Champions Trophy in Kenya, losing in the end to Kiwi Chris Cairns’ batting heroics of a lifetime, he had already obliterated the captaincy issue and made the match-fixing saga take a backseat with tight seat belts on. The subsequent face-offs with Steve Waugh, the Lord’s balcony striptease, the numerous runs-in with cricket administrators, was always a manifestation of the fact that he wanted India to display not just positive aggression through cricketing performance on the field, but also develop a tough, no-nonsense, self-respecting agro pitch in body language off it.
Ganguly was also aware that the mental paradigm takes longer to penetrate, and had begun psyching up the casually subdued, subjugated mind-set of Indian players, conditioned to a post-colonial hangover, suffering from a gnawing inferiority complex. Being a Prince from the very quarters from where the East India Company operated for decades, I am sure it gave him a deep-rooted fillip, resulting in a natural outburst against imperiousness of the arrogant Aussie kind. Notice how a normally imperturbable Sachin Tendulkar provoked an angry excahange with Glenn McGrath at Nairobi, taking the boorish bowler by surprise.
I also think where Greg Chappell was concerned, Sourav was in a great hurry to quickly establish his professional equation with the coach; Ganguly would call the big shots. Period! The fact that he slipped treacherously on muddy ground and leaked e-mails, and instead Greg Chappell annihilated him in broad daylight, is now old tale. And a classic conspiratorial Et tu Brute story. I am convinced that someone with tremendous political insight let Ganguly down, someone who knew that Sourav would soon be on a deceptive wicket with impending power-shifts at the BCCI HQ. Chappell merely played the cards perfectly; but it was someone else who orchestrated the entire charade.
That it now takes a multinational cola company to promote the mere existence of a man who once made India proud, is a tragic commentary on the way we are. But I say hats off to Sourav for doing the promotional ad campaign; it takes guts, self-respect, self-belief and a battling attitude to face the world with such humility and grace. The soft-spoken bespectacled bloke is a team man, after all.
I have consistently rooted for Sourav not out of any personal predilections, but because I feel his contribution to Indian cricket goes beyond his on-field achievements. And statistics.
As India take on West Indies in Ahmedabad on 26th October 2006, I know Ganguly will be rooting for Rahul Dravid & Co.
Gandhigiri, yes! Dada-giri, most certainly!
