How a leader shrinks in stature on the small screen

ON THIS the crucial fourth morning of the Kandy Test, where does Sourav Ganguly (now saddled with a Falstaffian outfit) stand in terms of retrieving lost Galle ground? ``The Worst Team In The World?'' ran the banner headline in an eveninger looking only to the morrow - as the first Test of the series came to be supinely surrendered by 10 Galle wickets. Sourav, by that fatal phase in his colourful career, had already pre-emptively identified himself, on TV, as ``the one who loses his job'', while those in selectorial and administrative authority enjoy fixed terms in our cricketing hierarchy.

The problem with Sourav is that he still speaks before he thinks. While Rahul thinks before he speaks. The fact that this technician alone stood really firm among the Galle ruins (61 not out from 172 balls spread over 219 minutes with 6 measured fours) naturally turned the spotlight on Rahul Dravid as the commander- in-waiting. Yet Rahul is in no great hurry in the hazardous hour handpicked (on TV) by the obstreperously self-projecting Sourav to be hoist with his own petard! If there is to be a Rahul takeover, Dravid would much rather prefer that such a denouement came about with the team's star performers (Sachin, Laxman, Anil and Srinath) back, touring the Veldt. For South Africa, remember, is where Rahul really first showed his international bloodlines with that Allan Donald-baiting 148 and 81 in the January 1997 third and final Test at Johannesburg. Rahul, since, has both scaled the heights and plumbed the depths - to emerge as a man with a mature head on sturdy shoulders.

If the focus was on Laxman (59 and 281, 65 and 66) when not on Sachin's (76 and 65 plus 126) - during the blood-and-guts series vs Steve Waugh and his team of momentarily dethroned world champions - Rahul here was the beaver working his wiry way back from no.6 with 180 in the Eden Test, followed by that sterling 81 in the Chepauk rubber-decider. Rahul has only grown in stature after that, through a span in which Laxman, lazily elegantly, has worked by fits and starts, losing his wicket, at times, in a style almost designed to add insult to injury.

An air of injured innocence is what is going to distinguish Sachin's return to the Test scene, once the shoe fits. And, starting Friday, October 5 (at Johannesburg), there are, on the anvil, at least six ODIs (making day-and-night viewing) before the three Tests in South Africa hold the screen. Such a challenging programme, televised live, should be putting Rahul on his mettle. For, whatever the Indian captain's TV travails right now, viewers are not likely to forget, in the event of Rahul's succeeding Sourav, that the mantle descends on Dravid from the left-handed blade of a vintage one-day performer - till the predatory Aussie diabolically disturbed Ganguly's striking rhythm.

Let us, in this amber light, take a peek at Sourav's and Rahul's last sequence of ODI scores - in Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka. Place Sourav's one-day 2, 85, 20, 62 and 28 (in Zimbabwe) against Rahul's 72 not out, 4, 15 and 30. Likewise, set Sourav's one-day 5, 69, 4, 0, 64 and 1 (in Sri Lanka) against Rahul's 15, 49 not out, 27, 43, 47, 57 not out and 21. In any such run-up, Sourav, under one-day scrutiny for the first time, logically would be expecting viewers to take cognisance of the number of dicey decisions recently standing against his name. Yet it is the `name' he earned that dried up the wells of sympathy for Sourav! As Sourav ceased to be a man of even one-day batting action, ``None of your lip!'' came to be the spot public verdict on his leadership.

A second viewing of Sourav's one-day scores (outlined above) would suggest that he was not failing all along the line. But the fact that viewers just no longer knew when Sourav would succeed and when he would fail India began, in pavilion-bound hindsight, to prove Ganguly's visual undoing. ``I have to score runs,'' Sourav is quoted as introspecting. ``I have scored four hundreds previously against this (Sri Lanka) side. I am making mistakes and getting out. I got a bad decision in the first innings (of the Galle Test). I got a bad decision in the first Test (at Bulawayo) in Zimbabwe too. But this is part and parcel of the game. I have been trying to do everything and I just need to spend some time in the middle.''

I sincerely wish that Sourav has delivered with the bat in what, for him now, is a Kandy Test of character. Even while saying that, my sense of confidence (as yours) about Sourav's scoring stands shaken. Public confidence so shaken left Sourav utterly broken by the Friday morning of August 17 - his Galle D-Day. Scores of 15 and 4 in the Galle Test all but exhausted the viewer's patience in the matter of waiting and watching to absorb if Sourav had, indeed, got yet another bad decision in the opening stanza of that first Test.

Changing thoroughbreds in midstream is not the done thing, so that Chandu Borde (as Chairman of Selectors) did well promptly to allay all reports of any immediate switch of guard. Yet India's captaincy problem merely stood procrastinated, not addressed! At the zenith of Ganguly's miracle triumph - and that, precisely, is what our 2-1 `Aussie' rubber looks in retrospect - Sourav's big brother Snehasish urged the Indian captain to cut the cackle and settle all `scores' with his bat centrepitch. But Sourav then, as a greyhound straining at the leash, was in no mood to listen. Sourav, consequentially, worked himself into the kind of anti- Steve frenzy from which he could not find a rational way out even against less daunting opposition. The Galle Test had Sourav (when 4) `playing on' in as predictable a vein as it had Sadagopan Ramesh (when 2) `playing the wrong line'.

On the line Sourav's captaincy need never have come in this TV- downsizing fashion if, as India's mercurial captain, Ganguly had learnt the all-important lesson of humility in victory. For the unvarnished truth is that India (via Laxman and Harbhajan, Rahul and Sachin) raised its game well beyond its known international standing in the Test-case of Sourav's putting it so sensationally across Steve Waugh's Australia on the Thursday of March 22, 2001, at Chepauk. A less `successively' victorious captain than Steve Waugh would have certainly thought twice before asking India to bat again at Eden (even when his Australia was 274 ahead), following the flair that Laxman had brought to moving from 26 (overnight) to 59 on the third morning of that watershed Test. But so comforting in its feel was the crest of the wave on which Steve Waugh then rode that he just could not envision Laxman, bat in hand, raising that dream 275 to wipe out India's 274 deficit in aristocratic association with Rahul.

Even less could Steve have expected Rahul (with that mind- bending 180) to overcome the Warne bogy in an idiom calculated to make Dravid cock a snook at Shane with that tele-abidingly dismissive wave of the bat. From Laxman to Rahul, from Eden to Chepauk, the bat certainly swung the way India wanted - even as the ball tellingly spun in the arc described by Harbhajan. The going was so good that the spell had to break. Instead of awakening to such an inevitability, Sourav (with that Bulawayo Test win) began entertaining delusions of grandeur, thereby turning himself into a symbol of pelf. The Harare loss of Test face put India again on the back-foot. A position from which Sourav finds it devilishly difficult to extricate himself to this day. Sanath Jayasuriya's Sri Lanka - upon finding Sourav's India vulnerable after our having worked the oracle in the titanic sinking of Australia - took a vice-like grip on the rubber with the Galle Test. Now Sri Lanka is unlikely, easily, to let the rubber slip out of its grasp at Kandy. Thus has Sourav whipped himself to a point of no return - for India.

Only a drastic reversal of tide (by this Saturday morning of reckoning) could see Sourav (sans Srinath, Laxman and Sachin) strengthen the toe-hold he now has on India's captaincy. It is a no-win situation of Sourav's own insouciant making. As a leader of men, Sourav Ganguly, in attuning himself to the Ugly-Aussie temper of the times, set a pace too hot to sustain. Result - what Sunil Gavaskar so evocatively described as ``the electric chair'' is warm again! Four months is all it has taken Sourav to unfasten the `Qantas' seat-belt! This when Sourav's achievement in beating Australia 2-1 comes as close to Kapil Dev's 1983 World Cup conquest as makes no difference. Late into the night of Saturday, June 25, 1983 did Kapil Dev hold aloft that champagne World Cup. Yet, by the Thursday of December 29 (in the same milestone year of 1983), the very same Kapil Dev had ceased to be the captain nonpareil of India!

For Clive Lloyd and co. had carried out their sworn resolve of `blackwashing', on our own soil, Kapil Devil's India (in the one- day slugfest) during the same traumatising year as the one (1983) in which they had been stunned witness to the World Cup's being seized from under their uppity nose! That, in the process of so thrashing Kapil's India 5-0 in the one-day face-off, Lloyd's West Indies also beat us black and blue (3-0) in the Test series (before the end of that `set' 1983) made Kapil Dev's position, as captain, untenable. Like Kapil then, Sourav has come a fair distance down from the Friday of April 6, 2001, when, even while losing the one-day series 2-3 to Steve's Australia in a photo- finish, the Indian captain held his head high with that resonantly struck 74 in the Goa ODI. It is that resonance we now miss in Sourav's bat. The Indian captain's voice sounds only as resonant as does his bat. There is a penalty to be paid for cultivating an image, larger than life, on the small screen. TV, as the great leveller, is ruthlessly exacting the price it then set on Sourav's head. ``New `skips' for old!'' is TV's knockout punchline.

RAJU BHARATAN

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