Excreta hits the roof - Part II

Part one was played out at the start of Greg Chappell's period as India's coach. Part two seems to be all set to be played out over the next week.

There's enough innuendo and enough leaked SMS messages/reports floating around about Chappell being disgusted with the attitude of 'senior players', the 'senior players' being disgusted with Chappell's attitude, etc. Add to it the enormously transparent BCCI whose officials, including former ones, go on record about what they feel about the coach, captain etc.

Although my belief is that Chappell and Dravid should stay, I fully expect the BCCI to not renew Chappell's contract. I hope Dravid accepts to continue on as captain because I believe he still has it in him to turn Indian cricket around, as well as because the alternatives (Tendulkar, Ganguly, Yuvraj or Sehwag) are unacceptable as far as I am concerned.

After India lost to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, my feeling was that there was a golden opportunity to clean up the mess that is Indian cricket. I use Indian cricket in a fairly generic sense. I include domestic cricket, youth cricket, etc. Basically start afresh, similar to how Australia did after losing the Ashes in the mid-80s. Take a guess about who one of Australia's national selectors was. He and his team picked guys like Steve Waugh, David Boon, Craig McDermott etc. despite some fairly average Sheffield Shield records because they felt that these players had the mental strength to cope with international cricket far better than others with superior domestic records.

But it is easy for Australia's selectors to identify mentally tough players. It's nearly infinitely tougher for India's selectors to do so - 27 first-class teams (Gujarat & Maharashtra have 3 teams in the Ranji Trophy), around half-a-dozen zonal teams, more than half-a-dozen competitions between these teams, etc.

I've read several arguments about why it wouldn't be possible to restructure the domestic system, how a 'foreign' coach can't understand Indian cricket (can someone define it please?), how an Indian coach is as good as a 'foreign' coach, why questioning the performance of some of Indian cricket's holy cows is tantamount to questioning their parentage, etc. My fear is that the administrators will also buy these arguments. I fear that the administrators, and everyone else who has a part in decision making, will miss the wood for the trees.

Meanwhile, Tom Moody, who didn't get the India job, must be giggling away merrily.

Labels: bcci, chappell, coach, dravid, greg chappell, india