It’s time to look for a remedy

Malcolm Speed’s jibe about the state of Indian cricket is obviously a half-truth — but the half which is true is significant enough not to be ignored by the Indian Cricket Board.

Surely ICC CEO Speed is trying to score brownie points by claiming that India hasn’t done much more than just win the 1983 World Cup. If he can jog his memory, there is the World Championship of Cricket and the Rothmans Cup triumphs in 1985.

If he wants to dwell in the present, Sourav Ganguly’s side was runners-up in the 2003 World Cup, drew the Test series against Australia later that year and shortly after beat Pakistan in Pakistan in both the Tests and one-dayers.

Add to this, 17 successful one-day run chases on the trot last season — and a whole lot in between 1983 and 2006 — and Indian cricket’s scorebook is not as barren as Speed makes it out to be. He could check out the corresponding records of England, New Zealand, Pakistan in the same period. Or the fact that, the extremely-rich English soccer, though flush with money, is not always the best in the world.

Frankly, the old-fashioned, colonial mindset where everything to do with cricket emerged from Lord’s — or now Dubai — was gospel is now firmly in the past. Some of Speed’s contentions are not only contentious, but downright unacceptable.

Recognising India as the financial powerhouse of the sport is neither rocket science nor a climb-down in authority; it’s a fact of life which, and should actually be exploited for the benefit of the game. In any case, many players, experts, other cricket Boards are doing this already.

Yet, it must rankle the BCCI — as indeed it does every cricket lover in this country — that after so many decades, the team still languishes amongst the also-rans. True, there will the troughs with the crests, but if the brilliant periods are fleeting in time and the lean periods considerably longer, some scepticism is inevitable.

It is somewhat bemusing that India’s successes and mishaps over the past year have been largely attributed to coach Greg Chappell. How can he be an evangelist and a cardinal sinner both in such a short time? (For argument’s sake, if Chappell’s forte is coaching methods rather than coaching those who are already in the international class, should he be handling the under-17s to create a reservoir of outstanding talent, I wonder).

In any case, I believe that the performance of a cricket team depends more on captaincy than coaching. The skipper takes the decisions on the field, so Rahul Dravid must take as much a rap — if not more — than Chappell.

But that is missing the woods for the trees. Dilip Vengsarkar’s cryptic comment after selecting the team for South Africa last week perhaps is the crux, and puts the coaching and captaincy issues in perspective. “We just do not have exceptional talent,’’ said the chairman of the selection committee.

That’s strong stuff. Add to this the fact that the West Indies, where cricket was dying two or three years ago, has made it to the final of the Champions Trophy, and Indian cricket starts resembling a Shakespearean tragedy.

So much going for it, and yet so little…