NEWS
MATCH REPORTS
DIARY
OTHER SPORTS
SLIDE SHOW
PEOPLE
ARCHIVES

The Rediff Cricket Interview/ Jaywant Lele

'It's pathetic that we have to field Srinath and Prasad in the slips'

Jaywant Lele, secretary of the Board of Control of Cricket in India, has had an eventful tenure. The Rajesh Chauhan issue, the splitting of the national team for the Toronto tournament and the Commonwealth Games, the fiasco at Kuala Lumpur, the Harbhajan Singh affair, the Test defeats against Zimbabwe and New Zealand and, now, the tour of India by Pakistan, which has become a prestige issue for the BCCI and the Vajpayee government.

Although he is under pressure from many quarters, Lele appears to have answers for everything. He takes pride in the fact that he is not interested in reading the Justice Y V Chandrachud Committee Report. A shocking admission, since the BCCI appointed the former Chief Justice of India to probe allegations of betting and matchfixing in Indian cricket.

Lele spoke to Haresh Pandya at the Baroda Cricket Association offices the other day.

Pakistan's tour of India seems to have become the issue now, what with the Indian government making all possible efforts for it to come off . What light can you throw on this matter?

You are not the first journalist to ask me this question. Nor are you going to be the last, I am sure. In the last four or five months, wherever I have gone, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, everywhere, I have been asked this particular question by presspersons. But I’d like to emphasis that no reporter should write anything about the Pakistan tour because it gives adverse publicity to the schedule tour. I'd like to appeal to the media people not to write anything at all about it. Why don't you write on anything other than that? It is going to give wrong signals. Unless and until the tour does take place, nothing should be written about it.

You are credited with the statement that senior Indian cricketers not keen on playing against Pakistan in the coming Test series should forget about playing in the World Cup.

I have never said anything like that. Why should I say anything? It's all wrong reporting. Whoever has quoted me as saying such a thing is definitely a mischievous reporter. I don't know why such nonsense is attributed to me.

Why did India come a cropper against Zimbabwe and New Zealand in the Tests?

In Zimbabwe, we lost because we did not get to bat first. We did not win the toss and it made the difference. In New Zealand, there was no reason for us to lose. It was a very easy game to win. If you get 6 wickets down for 200 runs and allow the last 4 wickets to add another 200 runs, that's unfortunate. If you have followed Indian cricket right from inception, and particularly in the last ten years, we are getting the top order out pretty quickly. It is the tailenders who often trouble us like anything.

Is it a sort of a jinx?

No, it is not. The fact is our bowlers are not bowling well. We can't get the other side out twice. We are not getting them out even once. Where is the question of getting them out twice? And if you have noticed, most of the time we have been winning on our batting alone, except for one game in Calcutta by Kumble and one by Tendulkar in Cochin. All other matches have been won on our batting.

That means the Indian bowling is really weak…

It is. It is a question mark. From the reports we get, from the commentary we listen, it seems to me that our players are not fully fit. It means those who are bowlers are not fully fit.

So what is the BCCI going to do about it?

Let us wait and watch. At the moment we are only going through the press reports coming from New Zealand; and the television commentary of experts. We hear Gavaskar talking, Ravi Shastri talking, Arun Lal talking. We have heard that the bowlers are not fully fit, they are not able to throw the ball. After bowling for 15 overs in the first innings, or making 50 runs, they can't run. So they stand in the slips.

It's pathetic that we have to field Srinath and Prasad in the slips. That means they are not fully fit. And catches are dropped. That means there must be some compulsion with the captain that they can't field in the outfield. They are that much tired.

When the fitness of our bowlers is so bad, as you believe it to be, what are the team physio and trainer doing?

It's a question mark to me also. I also don't know what they are doing. Now the team consultant Bob Simpson has reached there (New Zealand). More is the reason that they should perform well.

Rahul Dravid has had a good tour of New Zealand. Do you think the century he hit in a one-dayer may prove to be the turning point as far as his career in ODIs is concerned?

As far as I am concerned, I've always believed Dravid is a good player, in both forms of the game. Dot balls are in everybody's career. If you study the careers of many players, Tendulkar is the only one who is achieving his targets in reasonably good time. If he plays 100 balls, he invariably makes 100 runs as well. Okay, once in a while they all make those fancy shots which fetch so many runs but they also tend to take quite some time to accumulate runs. We just can't blame Dravid because he goes at No. 3. But then we are also responsible for that.

If the first wicket falls early, Dravid should go at No.3. But if the first wicket falls at the thirtieth over, why should Dravid be sent? He should be sent at No 6. We've good batsmen who score at a faster rate. Jadeja is there, Robin Singh there… They should go and do the job.

But if the wicket falls early, Dravid is the one who is going to hold the fort. He should be there in the team because every time you can't have five batsmen who are going to be match-winners. Sometimes the situation demands that somebody has to stay at the wicket.

Dravid had not been getting runs becasuse maybe he was a bit hesitant to play his shots, thinking perhaps that if he played his shots and got out early, they would drop him. But now his performance in New Zealand should do his confidence a world of good.

'It is unfortunate that our captain is harping on the same thing'

People