Er, who’s the captain now?

(Drat, I knew I missed a trick when I discontinued ‘The future cricket’ series after just five musings. I touched on the toss and just when I was on to something big, I let go. And now this man has beaten me to it. I can’t prove that the idea crossed my mind earlier, so I won’t take him to court but I am compelled to share the conversation I had with John Buchanan sometime last year when I was in Kolkata.)

Me: Hi, John. Good we could catch up like this. I know I don’t have the kind of experience you’ve had, coaching one of the most successful cricket teams ever, but…

John: Hold on there, mate. Just get your sequence right – I wasn’t the coach of the most successful team, I made it the most successful team ever.

Me: Warney had me believe otherwise, just after the 2005 Ashes loss.

John: I knew you’d come to that. Read my book If Better Is Possible to understand the reasons for that defeat. I just let Jamie (Siddons) lose it for us. It was an important stepping stone for him.

Me: Oh yes, I remember reading that book. You also had some convincing explanations for the loss to India in 2001, didn’t you?

John: I don’t quite remember what I said then, my agent said that we needed a compelling explanation, and I think we came up with some reasons that night over a few drinks.

Me: Interesting… any way, John, I wanted to sound you out on an idea I had while I was working on a series of posts on my blog on cricket reforms.

John: Ah, you write a blog, do you? Do you think something like that will help my consulting business? I don’t mind re-releasing my book in the blog format if it helps.

Me: Er, I don’t think I’m quite the best person to answer that, being an amateur blogger myself.

John: Oh ok. I think I’ll check with my agent on this. Thanks for bringing it to my notice. Let’s move on. You were talking of some cricket reforms. What are you thinking?

Me: I am wondering, why should a team have only one captain? I can understand a team having one wicket-keeper, but just as there are three departments in the game, why can’t there be multiple captains?

John: What a crazy idea! Why would you want that?

Me: Well, I was just thinking. There used to be this criticism about bowling captains either under-bowling themselves or over-bowling themselves.

John: Nah, bowling captains are just too fat and obsessed with their cell phones.

Me: And some batting captains are so worried about the team, it tends to affect their personal performance as batsmen.

John: No no, Mark Taylor was a genuinely bad batsman, but go on.

Me: Moreover, nowadays there are so many roles captains have to play – selector, player, media relations…

John: Brand endorsement, representing the country in inane ICC meetings… I get the drift. But I still don’t know how it will work out.

Me: Me neither, but if there is one person who can carry this off, at least on an experimental basis, it’s you I reckon.

John: That is absolutely correct, mate. No one else can even talk of this with a straight face. Hmmm… these Englishmen don’t seem to want to win the Ashes – they’re not calling me to coach their team. They could’ve made good guinea pigs.

Me: Do you think you can perhaps write an article about it and get some views from other experts?

John: No, I’d rather leave copies of the article in hotel rooms accidentally, that strategy works better, but hey, wait! I wonder I can try it out with the Kolkata Knight Riders at the next IPL. I can kill multiple birds with this one stone.

Me: Er, how?

John (visibly excited): I can make Sourav the mascot captain. So he can wear those funny costumes (or may be take his shirt off) and cheer the team. That way I can get rid of him from the eleven. I can get Ponting to do some field placements. Now that should make the game more competitive and push our bowlers hard. Chris Gayle deciding the batting order should pose some problems for the fielding side – he will take so much time with his decisions on the batting order that it will affect the over-rate. Brendon McCullum can do some pitch reading, Brad Hodge can be the captain of the reserves… the possibilities are endless.

Me: Er, that’s quite not what I was thinking…

John: I think I’ve cracked this. This innovation should take the cricket world by storm. I can see the next ICC captain’s conference being held at the pitch at Lord’s, just to ensure there’s enough for all the captains from the different sides. Thanks for being a sounding board for my ideas, mate. You want to pick up the tab?

(To avoid the public glare wherever we go, John and I were in disguise at an undisclosable bar in Kolkata. Hence I cannot prove this conversation happened. Lucky bugger, John!)

Oh captain my captain

It is no surprise that Michael Vaughan and Paul Collingwood have given it up – it is not easy captaining the English cricket team in today’s era. The demands are just impossible.

To begin with, the selectors, the media, the public all want their captain to score runs. Where would they have found Mike Brearley if that had been the condition in the 1970s? Or Mike Denness before him? Even Vaughan resigned because such inhuman demands were placed on him. There’s one of two things he can do: pat his bowlers in the back after grounding yet another catch or launch into a flowing cover drive. Which would make a bigger difference to his team’s fortunes you think?

The media in particular (and we know how they rule the selectors’ minds, don’t we?) wants the captain to be kind to their representatives as well. So when Vaughan questions the cricketing records of a journalist, he’s pilloried. There’s no place for a candid captain nowadays, is there? Now who else does this expectation rule out?

As I write this piece, national selector Geoff Miller comes up with a new demand: he wants one person for both the test and the limited overs captaincy. It’s a shame on Andrew Strauss, isn’t it? May be he can offer to keep wickets in one-dayers. He does have a successful precedent in India’s Rahul Dravid, doesn’t he?

Some sections of stakeholders (selectors, officials, media, the public, the blogerati, the neighbourhood dog) are beginning to ask for experience in a captain as well. Come now, imagine the kind of people whose services England would have lost out if such a silly demand had been taken seriously in the past – Tony Lewis and Chris Cowdrey are just two illustrious names I would like to mention. I fear we may have lost the services of that wizard, Robert Key, for good (or bad, come to think of it). Alastair Cook, as an extension of the same logic, may be deemed too green just now.

Finally, and this is surely the work of a Tony Greig baiter, there are ear-splitting whispers that the selectors should stick to true Englishmen as captains, not people who adopted England as their country. So that puts paid to the hopes of Kevin Pietersen – he can win matches for England with his bat, no problem, but he can’t use his brains to lead them to victory. The English have a nation to defend, what is a few losses on the field?

So who does that leave us with? Andrew Flintoff? Will he behave with the media? Ian Bell? Isn’t he likely to be too aggressive? Ryan Sidebottom? Now why is no one talking of his candidature?

Misbah’s captaincy credentials

Pakistan’s captaincy challenge ahead of the Bangalore test has offered enough juice for former Pakistan players to offer their considered opinions. In the true spirit of the unity that characterizes Pakistani cricket, there are as many opinions as there are opiners (a word I just made up). So Younis Khan has a backer (even if he doesn’t want one); so does Mohammed Yousuf; and Shoaib Akhtar, Salman Butt, Kamran Akmal and Misbah-ul-Haq. (Danish Kaneria is apparently miffed that his name has not been mentioned so far – so searches are on for a former cricketer who is ready to recommend Kaneria’s case. Interested candidates may please apply to the nearest media house.)

The most original of all the recommendations must be from Rameez Raja, who is pushing for Misbah’s candidature. According to a report in The Times of India, Rameez thinks that Misbah is the man for the job because of his “form and his educational qualifications.” (Misbah, apparently, like Rameez himself, is an MBA.)

The future of cricket has been well and definitely ushered: the captain has to be an MBA, the wicket-keeper will need to be a financial controller, the openers will need to be operations managers (handling dull but important tasks), the spinners will be the creative sorts, and the fast bowlers, well, I suppose they’ll be the sales types – low on predictability, high on returns when they hit it right. The corporatisation of cricket is well and truly upon us.

The Great Indian Captaincy Challenge

So Sachin Tendulkar has given us a good topic to chew on. Should MS Dhoni be India’s test captain and thus ensure one captain across all forms of the game? Should Anil Kumble be offered an opportunity to show us what might have been? Should Saurav Ganguly be given another tilt at the world champions in their backyard? Or should VVS Laxman be chosen because he has a track record for tormenting the Aussies?

Well, the debate will go on, and any decision is bound to disappoint three-fourths of the cricketing pundits and fans in the country. Are there different ways of looking at the Indian captaincy than just considering some individuals?

Greg Chappell showed us one way, when he kept mixing up the Indian middle order – one day Irfan Pathan came in at No. 3, the next day it was MS Dhoni, and Rahul Dravid came back on the third. Is there a learning from here? Can we have captaincy by rotation? Imagine a core group, let’s call it the Board of Captains, comprising the four contenders mentioned above (add a couple more if you want). The captain for each game will be picked from this committee. Surely Ricky Ponting and gang will be stumped because they won’t know what to expect?

But how would we select the captain for the game? Well, there are a couple of ways of doing this.

The simplest approach would be to draw lots in the press conference the day before. This would ensure a filled room, and more than a bit of excitement. Dilip Vengsarkar goes, “The captain for tomorrow’s test match is…” and Shantakumaran Sreesanth struts into the room. “Oops, sorry, wrong room. I was looking for the dance floor.” Of course, a draw-of-lots approach could mean the same person getting lucky twice in a row, but in the long run, the laws of probability should even things out. After all, we need a long-term orientation in captaincy.

A second approach could be to select the captain on the morning of the match, based on the pitch conditions. So Saurav is the captain for the Melbourne opener, Kumble leads the team at spinning Sydney, Laxman calls the shots on the Perth trampoline, and Dhoni takes over in the dead rubber game at the Adelaide Oval.

May be there is an alternative way to look at the captaincy, with a small tweak of the laws of the game. Law 1.1 says, “A match is played between two sides, each of eleven players, one of whom shall be captain.” Perhaps the BCCI can negotiate with the ICC and get them to change the law to enable a 12^th man to be named captain of a team. Look at it this way: the player-as-captain is relevant only when a team is fielding. And it is increasingly true that the 12^th man is almost always on the field, especially when India is out there – if Ganguly is not tired, then a pace bowler has just finished a spell or someone else needs to be hidden. And by virtue of being the 12^th man, the captain will be spared the pressure of bowling or batting, and can thus concentrate on the captaincy. A focused captain is what we need for the tough Aussie tour.

Extending this logic to having a non-playing captain is a thought, but then we would still have Sunil Gavaskar captaining the Indian team, so may be we shouldn’t go that far.

A mini-masterstroke

After having scored 157 for 5 in their innings, India look all set to lose (surely this target is at least 20 below par for the ground?) the finals of the World Twenty20, but full credit to India’s new skipper M S Dhoni for the intrepid selection of Yusuf Pathan for Virender Sehwag.

A conservative mindset would have felt that blooding a new player in the finals of a marquee tournament is not a good idea. But Dhoni went ahead with the choice instead of opting for the safe but tried-and-failed options – Dinesh Karthik and Ajit Agarkar.

The idea may not have succeeded completely, but Dhoni has made his point – captain courageous he sure is. It remains to be seen how much the establishment will let the skipper have his way, at least on the field.

Who next?

So the hoped-for has happened – Michael Vaughan has stepped down as England’s captain for one-day internationals. The selectors must has heaved a huge sigh of relief, because it saves them the task of having to carry him in the one-day squad – you can’t drop a self-appointed captain, can you?

So who are the alternative candidates?

Paul Collingwood is touted as the favourite and he is well likely to end up with the job. He has been the model of consistency in the English team (in both forms of the game) over the last few seasons. But is he captaincy material? He looks more like a capable foot-soldier, someone who was perennially in the fringes until he blossomed over the last two seasons. So will he provide the kind of overt leadership that England needs in one-dayers, a form of the game they seem almost reluctant to master? Moreover, considering that all three facets of his game will come to the fore in one-dayers, will captaincy be an additional load on Collingwood?

What do we make of all the talk about Kevin Pietersen being in the running? Now this could be an interesting choice. England desperately need to invent themselves as far as one-dayers go. So it may be worth considering someone who comes across as so unorthodox, as KP certainly does. His lack of experience (he has played only 51 one-day internationals so far) may be counted against him, but perhaps that is precisely what England needs. Someone with too much experience may just continue with the old mindset.

If he gets back to full fitness, can Andrew Flintoff walk back into the one-day team as captain? Well, Vaughan did that in the test arena, didn’t he? After a promising start, Flintoff’s captaincy came apart in Australia. But then, Australia is Australia, and the Ashes may not have been any different if England had had a different captain. Of course, it is an additional load on Freddie considering the all-round expectations from him, but the one-day game is more his métier and he has the personality to garner the troops, so he may just be an option.

Is there a fourth candidate? Not within one’s sight, but you never know with England and one-dayers. Remember Norman Gifford? Remember Adam Hollioake? It’s not just the weather that is unpredictable in England.