Sachin’s book raises foreign coach conundrum

Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way, is a runaway hit. Why would it not be, given the master batsman’s massive appeal not just in India but all over the cricket world too?My copy of the book remains unsigned (Sachin had flown off to England by the time I bought it on Friday) and unread (as yet), juggling as I am with several other assignments currently. But some of extracts and reviews that have appeared have caught my attention.

If, as has been highlighted by early reviewers, Tendulkar has made only cursory mention of the match-fixing scandals that hit Indian cricket (in circa 2000 and 2013) then it is a bit disappointing. Tendulkar’s fans in India and across the globe would have wanted to know how an icon, arguably the greatest batsman in the world, felt when the world around him crumbled.

Meanwhile, what has captured the public space and my interest since the book came out is the fracas over Greg Chappell’s stint as a coach in the period between 2005 and 2007 and how Tendulkar, will-nilly, became one of the lead role players in it.

Everybody knows that the former Australian captain’s tenure was tumultuous for the fractious relationship he had with senior players in the team. But Tendulkar’s revelation that Chappell wanted to replace the then captain Rahul Dravid throws open a whole new facet on the turmoil that prevailed in Indian cricket then.

Several Indian players (Ganguly, Laxman, Harbhajan, Zaheer) have echoed the disparaging sentiments about Chappell by Tendulkar. The Australian has denied Tendulkar’s claim or at the least the chronology of the sequence of events as described in the book. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this as yet.

But more than these details, the current discussions raise the question about the need for foreign coaches in India. There have been several critics of this policy of getting people from overseas at the expense of homegrown expertise, Sunil Gavaskar being the most trenchant.

Since the year 2000, India have always had a foreign coach (barring brief spells by Ravi Shastri and Lalchand Rajput in 2007) beginning with John Wright and continuing now with Duncan Fletcher, Chappell and Gary Kirsten filling up the interim.

Ironically, it is players from successive Indian teams in this period including Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman, Sehwag, Kumble etc who did not want an Indian coach. The last full-time ‘Indian’ coach was Kapil Dev who achieved little.

The late Raj Singh Dungarpur, who had pushed for Wright’s appointment, had revealed to me that he had gone by the consensus opinion in the Indian dressing room. “Our boys feel that former Indian players will be either parochial or have ego-hassles.”

It must seem even more ironical now that Chappell was cherry-picked by Sourav Ganguly. The two fell out almost instantly, Ganguly lost his captaincy and the next 20-22 months saw among the more unseemly chapters in Indian cricket unfold culminating in the first-round exit in the 2007 World Cup which led to Chappell’s resignation.