Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

Dhoni Should Go

Posted: January 7, 2011 by The CouchExpert in India in South Africa 2010-11, Opinion
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Prasad Moyarath

Bangalore

6 January 2011

“A captain is only as good as his team,” is a popular saying in the cricketing world and if this holds good, Mahendra Singh Dhoni should be the best Test captain in the world at the moment. No doubt, the Indian Test team has been doing well under his captaincy and has attained the no.1 ranking. Fighting back and winning Test matches abroad has become a habit for India, but still find satisfaction in drawing a series abroad and are not disappointed in not winning it. Indian team still gets worried about the green top wickets even though they boast of the best batting line-up in the world. Don’t you think that there is something missing in the overall performance of the best Test team?

Though India with Azharuddin as captain and Ajit Wadekar as coach won a lot of Test matches, those wins were never appreciated by critics as the majority of these wins were in India and on spinning pitches. It was Saurav Ganguly who changed the face of Indian cricket team with his aggressive captaincy. Those who switched off their TV sets after the exit of Sachin Tendulkar till then started watching the whole innings. Ganguly was a players’ captain and also a people’s captain. He stood for the players through thick and thin and instilled confidence in youngsters. Don’t forget that when Saurav Ganguly took over in 2000, Indian cricket was in dire straits after the match fixing controversy. That young Indian team has matured under the subsequent captains Dravid and Kumble. Now under Dhoni, the team is still winning due to the performances of the experienced players.

Any cricket fan following the development of Indian test team will notice that the performance graph of this team is not on a big ascent after the exit of Ganguly as captain. From a losing team abroad, India reached the level of drawing team abroad under Ganguly and now after a few years under Dhoni, the team is expected to be a winning team abroad. That has not happened and don’t seem to happen in the near future and that is when we look at the strategies and skills of a captain. No new strategies, poor man management skills and the team lacking killer instinct, Dhoni as a captain stands exposed after the South African Test series.

Attacking the opposition team verbally before a Test match is a common tactic used by Australia and South Africa and Dhoni played into their hands by criticising Sreesanth in public. Sreesanth’s good bowling in South Africa despite his captain’s public criticism shows his strength of character and not Dhoni’s man management skills. He forgot what Andre Nel and Allan Donald had done to Indian batsmen years back and found fault with Sreesanth. This was never expected from an experienced captain.

With South Africa in dire straits in the fourth day of the final Test, Dhoni had no back-up plan to counter Kallis and tail enders. The fact that the fielder who went to the boundary to fetch the ball after Kallis reverse swept Harbhajan never came back to his actual fielding position showed Dhoni’s lack of confidence. With Harbhajan bowling well from one end, any captain would have bowled a left arm seamer from the other end to help the off-spinner with the rough created by the left-arm seamer’s foot marks, but not Dhoni. He preferred to start the fourth day with Sreesanth.

Dhoni doesn’t seem to nurture talent like Ganguly. Abhimanyu Mithun, who bowled decently in the dead tracks in SriLanka was never selected to represent India again even though Dhoni had praised his performance. There is no doubt that Mithun would have bowled better than Ishant Sharma in the bouncy tracks in South Africa. Is Dhoni like Azharuddin, not having the back bone to fight for his favourite players with the selectors? If India was playing for a draw on the final day of the third test, why didn’t he send Pujara at No.3 after the fall of Sehwag? That would have given a big boost to the confidence of this youngster.

India is an ageing side and if they have to escape the phase that Australian team is going through now, BCCI has to take some bold steps. Dhoni doesn’t seem to have the skills to take India to the next level and we should not get fooled by the statistics. It is time to think beyond Mahendra Singh Dhoni as captain.

Ian Chappell: Past his Use-By-Date?

Posted: January 5, 2011 by rjsays in Cricket, Opinion
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Rajat jain

Mountain View, CA

5 January 2011

Ian Chappell has been a great batsman, an astute captain, and an interesting observer of the game, and ranks high in the list of favorite cricket columnists and commentators. One of Chappell’s strengths, unlike most of his fellow colleagues, is he does not fear in saying his mind, and does not need to sugar coat his voice to hide something harsh he may have to say. And it is refreshing to see a person not afraid to say the obvious with the fear of making a person or player of a high stature angry, when the cricket world is filled with numerous diplomats (the leaders of the pack being those anchoring the microphone for the IPL). Geoff Boycott is another analyst whom I enjoy listening to.

As great as it might be, speaking up the mind and being critical requires a great thought process, a process following game from an unbiased point of view and evaluating the game not as a critic, but as a fan. Being a great batsman, but more importantly a great captain, Chappell has this ability to analyze the game intelligently and quickly became a constructive critic of the game enriching it with his great intellect. And the great thing about him—as it is with great analysts—was that he knew where his strengths lie and acted accordingly (unlike a Ravi Shastri or Sunny Gavaskar).

Unfortunately for him, though, he has gone so deep into acting on his strengths, that it has become his biggest weakness. In trying to analyze the game from a critic’s point of view (and not a fan’s), he has himself become its greatest critic. And it is not only today, but happening for some time now. In 2007, after the Indian disaster at the World Cup, he was among the first to ask for Sachin Tendulkar’s immediate retirement from the game.

Neither Sachin, nor the Indian panel of selectors followed his judgment, and three years later, Sachin has not only become inarguably the greatest batsman in the last three years, but has gone to such heights that no player barring Jacques Kallis, and (with a faintest of chances) Ricky Ponting can even think of coming close to. And he achieved greatness to such an extent that the same person who wrote in length on Sachin’s dismal mental strength acknowledged it two years later.

And the story is continuing for this former Aussie great. Never the one to support aging out-of-form but champion players, Chappell wondered the state of the Australian team without Mike Hussey as he came back into form in the Ashes after a series of disappointments. On the other hand, though, Chappell has left no stone unturned in asking for the resignation of Ricky Ponting from captaincy, and even possibly his retirement.

It seems that his great analysis skills are have now shrunk only to follow the flow of the river and wet the hands while at it. And it is not only in the analysis of matches and players. It has hampered his analysis of the sport in general. Listen to the podcast by Harsha Bhogle featuring himself and Sanjay Manjrekar, and it is clear as to who was doing the bulk of analysis, and who was merely acting as a critic for being a critic.

Just like Chappell said for his countryman Ponting, I feel sad to say that Ian Chappell is past his “use-by-date.” And it is time he devotes himself to something other than the sport he dearly loves ……… to criticize.

WILL YOU EVER WALK ALONE?

Posted: December 30, 2010 by thecognitivenomad in Football, Opinion
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Chandrasekhar Jayarama Krishnan

My couch, Chennai

October 23 2010

The argument here is not that Liverpool failed to do what the big clubs achieved quite brilliantly, so far. There are no stunning contrasts in evidence yet; success and failure are to be measured by very narrow differences. Even the best of clubs have been through phases where their positions were placed under severe strain, by either the constant drain of resources or futile administrative battles.

It takes a great deal of blame storming to specifically examine the causes of collapse, often zeroing down on precise moments in which the destinies of empires were determined: A storm over Persia, the fall of Carthage, a battle for Rome and the rusty gates of Anfield Road. The greatest triumph of one is always the beginning of the end of another.

There is little doubt that each powerhouse that followed the last got better and better in its quest for national and continental glory, by devising devious strategies (through foreign ownership mostly) to proclaim its divine throne on the rest of the nation, stepping over the little clubs and holding them by their leash. Even Manchester City, just like those clubs before this era, will rise and fall, sooner or later. And a day will come when people will talk about such clubs as a long gone, forgotten concept, an idea that was meant to grow endlessly and read about in books of football history, remembered for what it was and what it could have become.

Just like Chelsea before them and Real Madrid FC, the men from Maine Road are now busy with their empire building, both in the continental and global branding sense. They are their own destiny; they make rules and break them – an invincible force trying to clutch the footballing world firmly in their hands of dominion. It sounds crudely mercantilistic to express it this way, but money is needed to acquire and protect glory these days.

If there is any trend that keeps coming back, it is that great powers come and go. No one can stay in the top forever. The cricketing heroes from the Caribbean saw it towards the mid-eighties, the Australian ‘invincibles’  have climbed down to P5 in the ICC rankings, few hardly remember the Chicago Bulls of the 90s, and Ferrari aren’t the dominating force they once were.

Liverpool FC has been through, and is going through, a phase where one too many a decision maker appears a fake conservative. There is no organized power that can restore the glory overnight, and with the dependency escalating dramatically, the only solution towards a repeat of ’89 and ’05 is patience. For a football world wary of Capitalist exceptionalism, this cannot happen too soon.

The argument here is not that Liverpool failed to do what the big clubs achieved quite brilliantly, so far. There are no stunning contrasts in evidence yet; success and failure are to be measured by very narrow differences. Even the best of clubs have been through phases where their positions were placed under severe strain, by either the constant drain of resources or futile administrative battles.

If a club over-expands itself strategically, it runs the risk that the potential benefits from expansion may be outweighed by the greatest expense of it all – a dilemma which becomes acute if the market has entered a period of economic decline. Or if the investments have gone haywire.

The story at Anfield has been a misapprehension towards entangling alliances like those with Messrs Hicks & Gillette. In fact, the loyal Kop were only too happy to see them disown the club and pass it over to yet another American capitalist. But it wouldn’t, essentially, enable us to return to the fairly isolationist posture that had brought many a laurel to the Kop.  Liverpool remain a great club because of the European might they once possessed, but they are in no sense an Empire, nor was there any real chance that they would try and become one.

There is still a great manager who should not be thrown out in haste; Hodgson’s basic views are still valuable and provide the basis for a compelling argument that right now, it is not within our right to be involved in the rat race to the top. The Soviets, once, could have quickly overextended to administer all Europe and would have tipped into an even more rapid decline than the one they eventually sank into. The state of affairs at Merseyside are partially polemical, a purpose to portray Liverpool as a club in decline and to cast doubt upon the most faithful of supporters as to where the fulcrum of the problem lies.

It is okay to get drawn into a rat race, provided that you seek to win it and return the club to its days of glory and preparedness afterwards. But we live with change every day, changes that may prove drastic enough to sweep old standards away forever. The great wheel turns, always forward, never back.

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