Different Angle

It’s amazing how life can change in a matter of few days. If you don’t agree with me, ask Ganguly. These days, he is the most eligible person to answer such queries. I had vowed not to write upon Ganguly saga. But this guy is creating headlines just too often. And the fact is that ‘love him or hate him but you just can’t ignore Ganguly’. This poor chap got everything wrong when he opened his mouth against Chappell after scoring an uncharacteristically irksome century against a hapless Zimbabwe attack. And that opened the floodgates for him. The person who was at the helm of reviving this ‘Team India’ suddenly finds himself struggling to secure his place in the team in both formats of the game and everyone interested in Indian cricket wants to know if it is the end of a prolific career. When the sky is blue, grass green and a team winning for fun, who cares about an individual!

Every Ganguly supporter, whether in Kolkata or England, believes that it is Chappell who devilled Ganguly’s empire. And what interests me is the fact that it is Ganguly who advocated Chappell’s nomination as the coach. Moreover, Ganguly himself had flown to Sydney a couple of years ago to take tips from Chappell for tackling short deliveries. We will never know what exactly happened during that short two months tenure of Chappell as coach that made him and Ganguly, the ‘captain’, the fiercest enemies. The reasons may vary from an elementary case of clash of egos to a relatively graver problem of absolute desire of securing throttling hold over the team.

Every single player in the team knew that Ganguly was struggling with his form and being the captain was the only factor that patronized his presence in the team. But no one dared to come forward to question his selection. But disaster always finds its way to creep into one’s life. This time around, it chose the victim itself to mend catastrophe’s path. Ganguly’s outcry on the occasion of a dead century was just one of those incidents. Too many things changed in a matter of few months against Ganguly’s liking. Leakage of Chappell’s ‘secret’ letter to BCCI President, Sharad Pawar’s emphatic victory against Dalmiya (Ganguly’s blind supporter) in BCCI elections, change in the faces constituting the selection panel and a sudden ascend in the performance of newcomers in the team made it virtually impossible for Ganguly to plot his comeback in the team. Moreover, Ganguly didn’t favor himself by bunking domestic matches citing one reason or the other. And the irony is that he was forced to compete against those players whom he had fought for in selection meetings during his regime. Kaif was preferred over him in one day internationals while Yuvraj displaced Ganguly in the test team. Even in one of the domestic test matches, Zaheer Khan, whom he backed so strongly, gifted him a ‘pair’ to make his case even weaker. How cruel life can be!

One can find half-burnt posters of Chappell on almost every street of Kolkata. Everyone claims him to be the source of Ganguly’s fiasco. But an interesting point is that Dravid might also be one of the masterminds behind all this drama. I know he has been a great servant of Indian cricket. He is, in fact, the best test batsmen India has ever produced and I rate him even higher than Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar in test cricket and I am no authority to suspect his commitment towards Indian team but the bottom-line is that the urge for limelight and power can make even the calmest person go mad.

It is no secret that Dravid has always lived in the shadows of Indian greats like Tendulkar and Ganguly and off late, of Sehwag. Ganguly and he debuted in the same game but he always fell behind when it came to the task of creating headlines. During late nineties and early part of the millennium, Ganguly reached the peak of his career and was considered among the best batsmen of his era. Despite playing as vital a role as those of Tendulkars and Gangulys, Dravid never got the same acclaim. He always played the role of second fiddle to other slam-bam players and thus the limelight was always attracted by everybody but him. His nature of batting was not compatible with those cricket lovers who visit grounds just to see sixes being hit. He has always done his job in tranquility and has always been the background color of colorful Indian cricket’s portrait. And suddenly he finds himself at the core of the Indian team with everything going his way. Now he is the captain of a team which is on an unprecedented winning streak. With everything falling into place, he is now acclaimed as a ‘thinking captain’ and is applauded for everything he does; be it taking the bold step of opening in the test matches or experimenting with the youths. He now bubbles with enthusiasm and is even ready to play the lead roles. He finds a Tendulkar who is struggling with his injuries, a Ganguly who is almost at the end of his career and a team that looks forward to him as an icon. The stage is set for him. He just needs to crush his ‘rival’ who is already on the floor. And his knack of playing his role in the background can pay him rich dividends in this field. He might prefer to hide himself in another shadow; this time in that of Chappell who has already earned some ‘popularity’ due to his open revolt against Ganguly regime. Dravid might not have staged the downfall of Ganguly but he might be eager to erase his name from future Indian team for his own sake. And he might be considering Chappell as the right person to use for his own benefit; Dravid’s words from Chappell’s mouth! I won’t be surprised if after his retirement, Dravid writes in his autobiography about the ways he used to debacle his opponents; be it Australia or Pakistan or Ganguly! Still water runs deep. Doesn’t it?

I know such an idea is somewhat difficult for diehard Dravid fans (including me) to swallow but I would advise them to hire a time machine and go back to year 2000 when Hansie Cronje surprised everybody by accepting that he indeed accepted money to lose matches. Wasn’t that a similar shock? Who could have imagined such a great ambassador of the game to be a crook? That’s what separates human beings from other organisms--Unpredictability! One should take nothing for granted. The unlikeliest and most grievous probability values are 0 and 1. And Dravid might be the perfect example for the word 'unpredictability'. But then, there is always a word ‘might’…