Opinion I shot the skipper

It might’ve provided for some good entertainment,if nothing else. Some curious situations had already sprung to mind: the dressing room before a big game — where a toss is under way to decide which of the four goes out for the toss,who gives the pre-match speech,the mid-innings speech,the post-match presser,etc. Or even the post-game team meeting after Captain A has led the team to a humiliating loss. Captain B saying to Captain C and D: “This would never have happened if one of us were in charge.”

A team environment,I’m sure can be statistically proven,is anyway conducive enough to the formation of cliques. Does a sporting unit,historically known to be hotbeds of backstabbing and intrigue,really need help? (“My captain is better than your captain,and I don’t care what you think.”)

And all this is assuming that by multiple captains,Buchanan meant different captains for different matches. There was a theory floating around the maidans of Kolkata that the team was going to have one captain to decide the batting line-up,one to make bowling changes,one to set fields and one to coordinate between all of them. This is where you say: “Huh?”

Cricket,last heard,was a simple game of bat and ball. Twenty20 cricket,from all available evidence,should be simpler still: see ball,whack ball. What,then,could’ve been Buchanan’s reasoning? Statistically he’s one of the most successful coaches in international cricket. Under him,the Australians stacked up so many victories that even a series of poor results two years later couldn’t knock them off the ICC top spot. (There is an alternate view that a team that includes the likes of Glenn McGrath,Shane Warne,Matthew Hayden,Steve Waugh,Ricky Ponting,Damien Martyn and other such giants hardly needed a coach,but we’ll leave that aside for now).

In cricket,unlike football or basketball,the captain plays a much bigger role than the coach. How often does the captain of a football team draw flak for a series of poor results? With this move,though,wouldn’t all that have changed? In today’s cricket,if there’s a debate over the final playing XI,the skipper would more often than not prevail. Under Buchanan’s master-plan,if the four captains disagreed,as was likely each time the KKR XI was being drawn up,who would have taken the final call? Buchanan himself,one would assume.

By the Australian’s own admission,it could only have worked if the communication lines within the team were open. But then,however open those lines would’ve been within the newly expanded think-tank,disagreements — even if they were polite — were inevitable. Except that where the captain would earlier play mediator,it would now have to be the coach (or rather,the director of cricket operations).

So it wasn’t really a question of whether Ganguly,Prince of Kolkata,was being cut to size; more like whether the institution of the cricket captain itself was being undermined. Cricket has seen many failed innovations in the past,and the only one that even came close to this was the ear-phone South African captain Hansie Cronje wore so he could communicate with coach Bob Woolmer.

Since the ICC was unlikely to bar a team from having four captains — despite the amount of time they spend dealing with insignificant issues — KKR’s unique trial would’ve been one of the more interesting stories to follow when the IPL unfolds in faraway South Africa.

deepak.narayanan@expressindia.com