A snob for the job

Ganguly is India’s first modern cricket captain. He’s also representative of the brash, post-millennium India, a society that’s cocky and decidedly middlebrow but hungry for a scrap and desperate to win.

This may be getting ahead of the story. Begin with the job description of a cricket captain. In football or hockey — or even water polo if you want — the team’s star is usually awarded the captaincy as a sort of meaningless honorific. He has a marginal role in terms of on-field direction or strategy; the coach does all the thinking.

Cricket is different. The captain is needed not merely to change field placings but to up the tempo, mobilise his men, play HR consultant to 10 colleagues. In the Indian team, comprising disparate economic backgrounds, regional variations and even languages, the job is decidedly more important.

At the most basic level, the captain has to be a communicator, unafraid of expressing his views. As a natural corollary, the captain becomes an adept at tackling the media, meeting the barbs and innuendoes of the rival team adequately and, in sum, giving as good as he gets.

Seeing a captain possessed with such self-belief, with such a sense of India, lifts the rest of the team. Indeed, it gives a vicarious thrill to the cricket fan as well.

What are the ingredients of a good cricket captain? He must wear the demeanour of a “most superior person”, intellectually or even socially. He must tell his men and, more pertinently, the opposition, “Look, I’m somehow better than you, a station above.”

Just chuckle at the way Ganguly’s got a rise out of the Australians, confused them into mumbling inanities over which is the world’s best team and whether run outs are a criminal act and why Melbourne has displaced Perth as Australia’s fastest pitch.

A talented batsman can get away with mere “cricket intelligence”. A captain would need to have a broader worldview. It would help, for instance, if he read books. Yet since not every captain can be a Mike Brearley or a Frank Worrell — and since cricket is not, mercifully, rocket science — it would be enough if he went to the right school and could hold his own in an argument conducted entirely in the English language.

In short, captaincy is coterminous with elitism or even the affectation of elitism. It is bad behaviour as psychological warfare.

Ganguly is only the latest practitioner of this black art. In some respects, Douglas Jardine was a predecessor — travelling, in 1932, to plebian Australia as the Imperious Agent, the aristocrat who experimented with a coalminer called Harold Larwood to neuter a run-making fiend.

Forget for a moment the angularity called Bodyline. Consider the mythology constructed around Jardine. Place it against the fables about Ganguly — “At home, servants pick up his cricket balls”; “He owns more cars than a taxi service”. The impact is the same. The Australians love to hate him — but their restiveness betrays some hitherto hidden sense of inadequacy. For India it is a huge, pre-toss advantage.

What does the Ganguly era mean for the future? That there can be no return to the days when the captain was the best player or the meekest one or a combination of the two.

Mohammed Azharuddin’s post-match analyses were as expansive as Bipasha Basu’s preferred clothing: “The boys played badly” or “The boys played well”, depending on the result. Tendulkar could have been India’s Imran Khan, the iconic captain who demanded and was not questioned. He could have asked for the moon; he settled for Vinod Kambli’s recall.

Perhaps it was because he had already achieved too much. Ganguly knows he is not an all-time great batsman. He can cement his place in history only as a captain who broke the mould, refused to play goody two shoes.

Cricket historian Ramachandra Guha calls Ganguly “India’s most non-parochial captain since Tiger Pataudi”. This is as much virtue as necessity. Ganguly is governed by enlightened self-interest. He is fair with his players simply because only the best team can help him achieve his goal of being recognised as India’s finest captain.

From such selfishness flows the greater good. Ganguly represents the cusp of Adam Smith and cricket, even if he doesn’t know it.

Ganguly’s elevation was an accident; the challenge is to institutionalise this process. The Australian way is to follow the principle that the most valuable player gets the top job. This often works; it has also led, in the past, to the wimpish disaster called Kim Hughes and to the juvenile Shane Warne as captain-aspirant.

There has to be an “Indian way” to choosing the captain, taking into account the pressure and the exposure, the ability to balance the equation between the cricket team and the horribly heterogenous society it draws from and gives to. For a start, stop looking for Tom Brown; captaincy needs a dash of Harry Flashman. That is Ganguly’s abiding legacy.