Can't understand, so can't explain!

Prem Panicker

Of late, I have been having this email exchange with an Australian sports fan, who stumbled onto Rediff while checking for Olympics news and, judging by his mails, appears to have begun following Indian cricket, and sport, with a vengeance.

Midway through this mail exchange, he sent me a mail with just this in it: "Prem, when I asked you about Indian hockey, you blamed the administration. When I ask you about Indian cricket, you blame the administration. Sounds strange, mate, from where I sit, it sounds like you have found a convenient whipping boy in the administration. Have you considered that it could be because of a lack of talent in India?"

How does one explain? How would anyone who has not lived a lifetime in this country, even begin to understand the dimensions of the problem? While hockey is not the theme of this article, a brief digression might be in order. Try telling a foreigner that after the Indian hockey team returned from Sydney with a seventh place finish to show for all that talent, the honourable K P S Gill, who heads Indian hockey and thus qualifies as the 'administration', had this to say: "We are not worried, we are planning for the 2008 Olympics, we have the juniors to win that one. And we are also working towards winning the next World Cup."

Hullo? Does this mean that Athens 2004 does not count? Since Gill has no plans for that edition of the Olympics, will he spare the nation the expense of sending a team there? Does he imagine that India is the only country in the world producing 'juniors', that throughout the rest of the hockey-playing world, births were frozen a few years ago, leading to a situation where, come Olympics 2008, India will be the only country which will have young players? And is he even aware that far from planning to win the next hockey World Cup, the immediate task for India is to even qualify to get into it?

Now try explain a KPS Gill to a foreigner -- what you will get is a blank look and a shake of the head. Said foreigner will imagine that to cover up the deficiencies in our country's hockey, we have invented a 'Gill' just so we can trot out the name at any and every opportunity, as a handy excuse.

Or take cricket. How, for instance, do we explain to a foreigner that just ahead of team selection for the Sharjah triangular, the team management sent in a request for an off-spinning all-rounder, arguing that Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, the two other teams in the triseries, have their fair share of left-handers and therefore, the off spinning option would come in handy (remember how Sachin Tendulkar made a similar request, ahead of the West Indies tour, and the selectors 'taught him a lesson' by sending him Noel David, and that only when Javagal Srinath broke down? Anyone hear of Noel David after that?).

How do we explain that the team management -- which includes coach Anshuman Gaekwad, captain Saurav Ganguly, vice captain Rahul Dravid and senior player Sachin Tendulkar, asked for Vijay Bharadwaj as their preferred off-spinning all rounder -- and the selectors in their wisdom turned the request down, deciding that India did not need an off spinner?

Who -- other than an Indian whose mind is calloused, and heart numbed, through years of suffering such idiocy -- would believe you if you told them that?

Who would believe that a bunch of selectors who, between them, have not even once stepped out onto the field at Sharjah, presume to know the conditions there better than players who play there at least twice each year? Who would believe that a bunch of selectors with their xerox copies of scoresheets have been set up as the better judges of a player's potential than senior players who have actually played with Bharadwaj?

Kevin Ripley might. But even the man behind the Believe It or Not series will have trouble swallowing some of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. Consider this: In course of casual conversation, a national player asks a selector, one of the famous five, about Bharadwaj. Why, the national player wants to know, is Bharadwaj not being considered any longer? 'Oh,' says the selector, casually, 'Bharadwaj was a wrong selection, a mistake. He is not fit for international cricket, we won't be considering him again.'

(By way of aside, the same selector told the same player they had made a "mistake" with another player -- M S K Prasad).

So casually, and with such disdain, are careers blighted. Would my Australian correspondent believe that? Would Kevin Ripley? Would you?

For now, let us leave aside the cricketing qualifications of Vijay Bharadwaj. Let us say that the selector in question, voicing the opinion of the all-knowing five, was right in his assessment that Bharadwaj is not suited to the big time.

Question one: Has any one of the five had the basic human decency to inform the player concerned, what their views are? That he should stop going to bed in hope, the day before each new team selection exercise, and waking up in despair when, yet again, he learns from the morning paper that he has not been considered?

No.

Question two: Have the selectors, individually or collectively, had the courage of their conviction and, fuelled by that courage, publicly informed the media their views about Bharadwaj? After all, we reporters keep bringing up his name, and the chairman of the selectors, serving as mouthpiece for his fellows, as regularly stalls with lines like 'He was considered, but...' Would not basic honesty demand that the chairman of selectors voice the collective thinking in regard to this player? And in passing -- who pays for the as yet officially unacknowledged 'mistake'?

How did it go again? Chandu Borde, after announcing the team for Sharjah, responding to a question about Vijay Bharadwaj: "We have not seen him for a long time and do not know about his injury status. Therefore, we have decided to go ahead with the same team."

A player is not considered because selectors have not "seen him for a long time"? What then is their job, if not to keep tabs on the players? "We do not know about his injury status." Do they not know about telephones -- those handy little gadgets through which you can communicate with just about anyone, these days, asking stuff like? 'Hi, there, pal, long time no hear, how's that injury of yours doing?' Or fax machines, those even more handy gadgets through which medical reports can be sent from point A to point B, eliminating that middleman, the postman?

Did they ask for a medical report? No.

Were they telling the truth, when they said that unawareness of his fitness is the reason he was not considered? No.

Would my Australian friend believe this? No.

From my good friend Jaywant Lele, convenor of the selection committee meeting under discussion, this: "We had received a request from the team management for an off spinner, but the selectors decided that continuing with the same combination was better suited for the team."

Maybe next time, when the team fails, we should be demanding an explanation not of the captain or the players, but of the selectors and Lele. If they know best (never mind the "mistakes" they make and admit to in private), then shouldn't they be the ones giving the long-suffering Indian cricket fans the answers we seek?

What I am about to write is absolutely pointless, so unless you have nothing better to do with your time, I suggest you shut down this browser right now. For what I intend to do is look at an alternate scenario, a different mindset, for the Sharjah tour.

Quick, without referring to records, can you tell me which teams played the last two editions of the Sharjah triangulars? No? Does that, then, give you an indication of how insignificant those desert thrashes are? We already know one thing for sure -- the only people for whom the Sharjah tournaments matter are the bookies, and the big-time punters. We can infer, too, that the board is only too willing to send its team to that venue for the exclusive benefit of those two sections of the population -- why, otherwise, would the board accept less guarantee money to send its team to Sharjah, than to other one-day tournaments elsewhere in the world?

But if you stay with the basic premise that winning or losing yet another Sharjah slugfest does not really matter in the overall scheme of things, then consider where Indian cricket stands now. A few senior citizens have been benched. A few others are now running on motor memory and the last remnants of their fuel. At the same time, we have a bunch of talented youngsters who did the country proud in the Junior World Cup.

Would not this have been the ideal time, and the ideal opportunity, to have given them a chance to strut their stuff at a higher level?

Could not the selectors have, for Sharjah, rested all the seniors -- Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Prasad, Agarkar, Kambli et al -- and in their place, picked the likes of Navneet Ricky, of Ritender Sodhi and SS Das and Santosh Saxena and Laxmi Ratan Shukla and ... never mind, you know the names.

Three wicket-keepers -- Ajay Ratra, Vijay Dahiya, Reuben Paul -- were picked in the preliminary squad for Kenya. Dahiya made the final cut -- with, thus far, indifferent results. Would not the Sharjah tournament have been an opportunity to try either Ratra, or Paul?

Why must we do this, could be the counter question.

The answer is simple -- we are at the start of a season. We have, ahead of us, a home series against Zimbabwe. More importantly, we have a home series against Australia early next year. We beat them at home, they beat us on their soil. Now it is round three -- and we owe it to ourselves to field our best possible squad.

By giving the youngsters a chance to test their feet in international waters against more than decent opposition, we would have had an opportunity to assess, at first hand and in the heat of competition, their potential and prospects. Thus, when it came to picking sides for the sterner tests, we would have a database of quality information to base our selection on.

That is a huge positive, right there. And what is the downside? We might have lost a Sharjah thrash (and who knows, the youngsters, playing with pride and as yet undimmed passion, might even have surprised all of us). So who cares, besides the bookies?

But we don't believe in thinking, do we? We don't believe in looking ahead, in planning for the future -- sufficient unto the day, could well be the motto engraved on the BCCI coat of arms.

So, come time for the next team selection, our venerable chairman of selectors can come before the public, and say, "We haven't seen Sodhi and Ratra and Paul and Ricky and the others play against any kind of decent opposition, we don't know if they are good enough, so we have decided to retain the same team."

I wish I could explain all this to my Australian correspondent. But to explain something to someone else, you first have to understand it, yourself.

I don't.

Do you?

Prem Panicker

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