http://www.mumbaimirror.com/nmirror/mmpaper.asp?sectid=6&articleid=642006017341564200601732859Men on Blue Lagoon
Kunal Pradhan
It started with stories about his big in-swingers and grew into a crescendo of romantic flashbacks about how he woke up each morning to the calling of the azaan. Irfan Pathan, swing bowler, youth icon, heartthrob, all-rounder — call him what you will — has, over the last three years, lorded over the world we live in.
Now, sitting on the sidelines as India’s lofty dreams of global domination have been buried in the Caribbean sand, he must be thinking about the irony. Maybe, at a more philosophical moment later in his life, he could even appreciate it.
But the fall from grace is not his fault. When people get built up beyond any sense of reality, such things are bound to happen. Pathan is not the only casualty of the so-called Vision 2007 that looks set to take Indian cricket five years back. He’s just the first blue-eyed poster-boy to fall by the wayside. And, the way things are going, he won’t be the last.
The Men in Blue, if they think they’re in any shape to win the World Cup next year, surely must be the Men on Blue Lagoon (with three cubes of ice and a twist of lime).
Over the 10 months, the team has been in the midst of a chemical reaction. A new coach, with powers beyond precedent, has opened his laptop and unleashed a vision that has sent people at the helm into a trance. The chairman of selectors seems unable to think beyond what the coach has decreed, and the skipper is totally sync with the former Australian captain’s plan of action.
The result — building a new Team India from the ashes of the old one — has made people affected by the corporate spiel very excited. Lots of illusions have been harboured, lots of delusions have been encouraged, and all the wrong conclusions have been drawn — as we can see by the beating India are getting from the team the rest of the world only considers better than Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
Power-point presentations, pocket-sized laptops and a run of victories on home soil don’t make a champion team. Some of us knew what was coming a long time ago, and now the rest of the nation is starting to run out of patience with the ‘business model’.
IS IT TOO LATE?
Look at the state Team India find themselves in now: They’re in the West Indies, far from home, playing the first test of a series, and three of the four bowlers have four matches between them. The guys with experience, not brilliant but proven to be more effective, have been packed off.
Why? Some because they didn’t run when they were told to, others because they were not deferential enough.
Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra and Lakshmipathy Balaji don’t fit into the new management’s line of thinking so they’re gone (snap your fingers), just like that. Ajit Agarkar is left out on a whim even after bowling well, for a change, in the one-dayers. And Harbhajan Singh’s confidence, already at an all-time low, is dented further by all the chopping and changing.
The batting is no better. Pull out Rahul Dravid from the lineup and we have nothing. VVS Laxman, the fall-guy for weeks now, is a mere shadow of the player he once was. Mohammad Kaif, dropped unceremoniously from the Pakistan ODIs, has gone from match-winner to mere survivor. And Sourav Ganguly, whose experience could’ve been put to much use in Sachin Tendulkar’s absence, has been done away because he was too much of a free spirit to let anyone else take firm control.
But the saddest case is that of the so-called all-rounder. Pathan has been reduced to a bowler who is good only for the first five overs, that too just to right-handers because of how he gets the ball back in. As a batsman, he doesn’t know any more if he’s a number three who’s coming down the order or a number six who gets promoted once in a while.
We may have fallen so far down this hole already that it won’t be easy to reverse the “process”. The Indian team has undergone such a permanent change that it could take years to rebuild, to get things back to where they were. Maybe there’s still time, but someone will have to act now.
It’ll be sad if we lose everything just because of some sophistry and a myopic Vision.
* We may have fallen so far down this hole already that it won’t be easy to reverse the “process”. The Indian team has undergone such a permanent change that it could take years to rebuild, to get things back to where they were. Maybe there’s still time, but someone will have to act now. It’ll be sad if we lose everything just because of some sophistry and a myopic vision...
AuthorTopic: Men on Blue Lagoon (Read 305 times)
August 26, 2006, 05:56:01 AM