Comment

The tribe of cricket pundits is an exclusive club and they do not like outsiders to judge them by commoners’ standards. Unlike the pundits in other disciplines they do not tolerate anyone challenging their wisdom and their assumptions.

The World Cup debacle of the Indian cricket team exposed the chinks in the armour of the players and that of theBCCI. It has also exposed the foolish and fanatic cricket fan. But not many have checked out the pundits’ foibles and follies. Political pundits take the rap constantly, but not the cricketing ones.

It has been interesting that the game’s pundits have been parroting received wisdom with much alacrity. When Greg Chappell was made the coach of the Indian team, they applauded, unabashedly and uncritically.

In the Saurav Ganguly-Chappell spat in Zimbabwe, they displayed uncommon solidarity with Chappell against the Indian captain, who was then down and out.

They did not dare to point out that Chappell had overstepped his brief as a coach, and that the issue of dealing with an out-of-form captain is not to support whoever wanted to be the dominant non-playing captain. When Rahul Dravid was named captain and played second fiddle to Chappell, the pundits described it as a ‘harmonious’ captain-coach relationship.

And they thought they were vindicated when the Dravid-Chappell duo won the inconsequential series against Sri Lanka, South Africa and West Indies on Indian soil in 2006.

Things were going wrong even then. The experimentation and rotation were taking their toll. The team was getting unsettled. Instead, they trained their guns on Ganguly and argued how right Chappell was about the former captain.

Even as spinning legend Bishan Singh Bedi was speaking loud and clear about what was going wrong with the Indian team’s preparation for the World Cup, and said in so many words that Chappell was blundering, the pundits gave him the benign cold shoulder.

Another former cricketer, Ajay Jadeja was the proverbial voice in the wilderness when he questioned Dravid’s captaincy skills, but he, too, was given short shrift.

In all the censorious post-mortems that followed India’s exit from the World Cup, they would blame the team as a whole, and players in particular — Sachin Tendulkar, Ganguly, Sehwag — but not one would say that Dravid did not fire up the team as much as he should have, and that he has to do more than take care of his own game.

Leading from the front means not just you score but that you take the team along with you. The plain truth is that Dravid is a gentleman player, but he is not the stuff captains are made of.

The pundits were in awe of Chappell. So they did not even have a mild word of criticism against his style, ways and presumptions.

It is excusable that the BCCI officials, who do not know anything about the game, were to be meek and solicitous towards the Australian coach. But it was the pundits who shied away from pointing out that he did many things wrong…and that was one of the key factors responsible for the World Cup disaster.

So, when Chappell blatantly talked to the television channel in the name of ‘sources close to Chappell’ and leaked his views about the players, they joined the chorus that the unruly players should be disciplined.

And when Tendulkar contested Chappell’s irresponsible remarks, they turned against him for going to the media. When Chappell’s stuttering and staccato telephone conversation with BCCI president Sharad Pawar was reported verbatim in a national newspaper, there was not one squeak from the pundits who had howled at Tendulkar.

When Chappell presented a sanitised version on the team’s performance to the BCCI, no one questioned the divergence between the earlier media leak and his official version.

The BCCI has bent over backwards to reward an unsuccessful coach with a sinecure at the National Cricket Academy because they do not have anyone better. But not a single dissident voice questioned the move.

We do not expect our cricket pundits to be like Neville Cardus, rounded human beings who show interest in cricket, literature and music. We expect them to be journeyman cricket writers — honest and workmanlike. But it’s a pity that they are not. Anymore.