Prioritise: Contracts, camera, fame or form

Among the many things I had to do on my first visit to Australia in 1991, I had to “ghost” columns for Allan Border. Unlike a few others...

Among the many things I had to do on my first visit to Australia in 1991, I had to “ghost” columns for Allan Border. Unlike a few others, who neither know nor care what goes under their by-line, Border was always ready for me, and as a result I was lucky that I could do what a “ghost” should really do, just transcribe somebody’s thoughts. It also allowed me to talk to him at some length (a couple of times inside the Aussie dressing room where inhibition never had to reside!) and in one of those meetings he told me a player should “take care of the runs and the dollars will take care of themselves”. It is a thought that never leaves the minds of the truly great for they know that when you seek the dollar the runs tend to look elsewhere.

Often the path a young sportsman, or any performer for that matter, chooses is dictated by the air he breathes, the atmosphere that he grows up in. You would have thought, in Indian cricket, that with the likes of Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble around, the debate between excellence and its fruit would long have been decided in favour of excellence. But the twin decoys of money and fame have many seekers in our cricket. Many have succumbed, many more will for blind pursuit cannot see tombstones or graveyards on the way. Only the truly successful chase neither. I suspect it is one of the reasons Indian cricket is in danger of losing a generation.

But see the air they breathe. The BCCI has always been a money first organisation. The product and the customer have meant little and hence, the strife it finds itself in. Player contracts are a mess, there is far too much meaningless cricket, there are no A tours to speak of, the academy is, well, there somewhere and there is no coach. The BCCI is always looking at tomorrow, that perfect mirage, for it glosses over a grisly today.

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The BCCI believes it has eighty days to find a coach and that boiling oil from hell will land on it if one is found twenty days earlier! They could, for example, appoint a new coach by the end of July so that he can travel with the Indian cricket team, get to know the players and be ready by end September so that he can begin in earnest for the one-dayers against Australia without having to feel his way around while up against the world champions. It is a question of priorities as it is for India’s young cricketers who are snowed under by Indian television full of equally young and impressionable reporters.

So how do we stop our cricketers from believing they have made it when they are merely scratching the surface. Dinesh Kaarthick is a fine young cricketer but at 22 he has to be left alone to work on his skills, to challenge himself, to become complete. So too with Sreesanth who strikes one as being of more fragile temperament.

This tour of England could be his for few young players in world cricket deliver the cricket ball the way he can. But much would depend on whether an earnest young man takes the field or a regional media superstar. Sreesanth and Irfan Pathan can be what Maninder and Sivaramakrishnan could have been twenty years ago, they are that good. But for that they must breathe a different air; one that repels those that promise bags of riches and embraces those that deliver them the right work ethic. They have to rise above the reality surrounding them to find it.

And so to succeed in England, India’s cricketers will have to stop thinking of contracts and coaches and cameras (after the match against Ireland a young reporter on a national channel promptly wrote off Tendulkar!). Part of it is their job, most of it shouldn’t. As always India have the players to win in England. As always, I don’t know if they have the team, or indeed the atmosphere in which to win.

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