A blog by Â(c)hinaman

Indian cricket has reached unknown depths.
For 20 months, Greg Chappell had systematically dismantled Team India,
the team shaped and built by John Wright and Saurav Ganguly.
We have been left with a disintegrated and fragmented team.
BCCI, for reasons unknown, is eager to cover up all the failings of the management.
But there is enough evidence in the media that tells us who the culprits were.
It only takes patience to look back and corelate events and statements.

For, to defragment the team,
the reasons for this failure has to be identified and eradicated.
A cancer left to grow will metastasize and destroy the whole system.

These are the two articles published in The Guardian UK in March 2006.
At a time when Ganguly had been successfully brushed aside
and the infamous spat had died down,
here was Mr Chappell stoking up the controversy.

Chappell rides bumps on road paved with passion and pop-star idolatry

Mike Selvey in Nagpur, Wednesday March 1, 2006, The Guardian

It must have taken 20 minutes or more to get from the entrance of Bangalore Golf Club to the terrace at the rear. Everyone wanted a slice. “Congratulations, Mr Chappell . . . Please sign this, sir . . . You are doing a marvellous job for us . . . A photograph please . . . Hats off after your wonderful win, Mr Chappell . . .” Greg Chappell obliged them all courteously. It goes with the territory.

That same morning, back at the bungalow in the stunning grounds of the Taj West End hotel, which is the India coach’s base, his wife Judy had taken delivery of a new DVD player and furniture that had been promised a while since. Neither put it down to pure coincidence of timing.

After a disappointing end to the recent Test series in Pakistan and a defeat in the first of the five one-day internationals that followed, India came good in resounding fashion, winning all of the remaining four games and sending a billion people into raptures. “It is astounding, isn’t it?” said Chappell, before observing wryly: “The hats will be back on soon enough if we start losing. We’ll come back home here one day and be sitting on the floor.”

It is nine months since Chappell, one of the game’s great batsmen in his time, gave a presentation to the Indian board’s selection panel on the theme of “commitment to excellence” and was appointed unanimously as the man to succeed John Wright and take the side through to the end of the 2007 World Cup. Thus far it has not been the easiest of rides, with battles to be fought with an often aggressive media and, by no means least, a vastly publicised and unsettling spat with the former India captain Sourav Ganguly that has divided sections of the nation, and which rumbles on still.

That side of things has proved a disappointment to Chappell, an unwelcome distraction from the task of taking the side onwards from the level to which Wright took them during his five years in charge before he became wearied by the relentless and onerous nature of the task.

For a while, the Ganguly issue – the captaincy passed to Rahul Dravid after it all came to a head during the tour of Zimbabwe – became all consuming. For the good of all, Chappell is keen to move it on from it now.
Some years back, Ganguly had come to him for coaching. “I helped him with his batting then,” said Chappell, “so maybe he thought I would be his mate and support him now. Certainly there is no way I would have got the job here without his influence. I’m sure he thought he would be able to run meas he did John in the latter part of his time as coach. But we clashed because his needs as a struggling player and captain and those of the team were different.

Chappell says
1. “maybe he thought I would be his mate
2. “he was sure Ganguly thought” he (Ganguly)
would be able to run him (Chappell) like he did with John.

By his own admission,
this was just Greg Chappell’s own thoughts
of what Ganguly may have thought!!
A thought about the possible thoughts of a third person.
To me this appears to be Mr Chappell’s paranoia.
He did not wait to see how Ganguly interacted with him.
To wipe of any feeling of gratitude or obligation,
he simply had to get rid of Ganguly.
It had nothing to do with cricketing issues.

Pity, you could not be a mate to the players, Mr Chappell,
like Tom Moody was to the Sri Lankans.
We would have done much much better.

Mike Selvey writes…

“I’m not the hard-nosed control freak that I have been portrayed. I’m thorough, a realist, a pragmatist and I’m honest. Much has been written and said, a lot of it misleading, but in essence I told Sourav that if he wanted to save his career he should consider giving up the captaincy. He was just hanging in there. Modest innings were draining him. He had no energy to give to the team, which was helping neither him nor us. It was in his own interest to give himself mind space to work on his batting so that it could be resurrected. He was not prepared to do that.

No? Mr Chappell?
This is what Bhupinder, the North Zone selectorial candidate, said about you,
“… If five players had ego problems, Chappell was the sixth problem.
Chappell was always complaining,
he wanted to tell the guys that he was the boss,
he never liked the way things were done.
Chappell had certain plans: Dravid is required, Sourav and Sachin are not required.
This was a divide and rule policy which was disastrous.”

Is it not more likely that you had “plans”, such as your experimentations
which were certain you could not implement as long as Ganguly was captain,
so you had to find someone else to replace him,
someone who in his gratitude would never go against you,
i.e. Rahul Dravid.

Mike Selvey writes…

What I didn’t realise at that stage was how utterly important to his life and finances being captain was.

And why may we ask, did you bring up Ganguly’s personal affairs,
when he had not said a single word against you in public?

Mike Selvey writes…

“The controversy will carry on but I have learned if I can’t be totally impervious to it then it is beyond my control. I have to let it wash by and say ‘people have their reasons for saying what they do and I can’t be distracted by that’ and do what I believe in.
At the end of my time, whenever that might be, the team and therefore I will be judged ultimately on the results we achieve, not whether I have been able to convince this or that member of the media that what we are doing is in the best interests of Indian cricket.”

Oh, yes Mr Chappell. We have seen the result “your team” achieved.
And not just in the World Cup,
but in our 1-4 drubbing by the Windies and a 0-4 defeat by the Proteas.
What you did was never in the best interest of the team,
you were always promoting your coaching methods.

Mike Selvey writes…

The showcase existence, even for the coach, is something for which no outsider can be truly prepared. In the hotel lobby after golf, Chappell sat and looked around at the numerous staff watching his every move, waiting on a whim, and shook his head. A teenage girl walked by and did a double-take. “Greg Chappell, oh my God, I don’t believe it.” Then, beaming, she just stood and stared, transfixed.

“I don’t think anyone can imagine just how much of a goldfish bowl it is until you are in it,” Chappell said. “I have travelled here before and been conscious of it but once you are inside that bowl it is quite amazing. The job I do carries with it an enormous responsibility, not so much to my employers but to a cricket-mad nation. I genuinely feel that, while I am being paid by the BCCI , I am working for the people of India, those who support the team, and they are many and varied and from all walks of life. I am lucky that I have been exposed to many different aspects of this country.

“We have played in the big metros of course but we have also played in some of the smaller cities and it is quite eye-opening to see how the average person responds to the Indian cricket team. When we arrive at airports, large crowds accrue. They want to see the high-profile players, they want to touch them, get a photograph of them. The most intrusive invention in modern times has to be the mobile phone-camera because everyone has a phone, everyone wants an autograph or a snap.

The mobile phone.
It is also a handy equipment to pass on dressing room news
to anyone, anywhere on the earth, without anyone ever knowing.

Mike Selvey writes…

“It is an unnerving experience to drive out of stadiums after we have won games or lost them and see the streets lined with people from all walks of life, particularly those from poorer communities whose only glimpse of the team would be as the bus flashes past and to see their faces light up. The only thing I can liken it to is the Beatles motorcade when they arrived in Australia in the 1960s. People lining the streets from the airport to the city. That happens here every day with this team.

“These guys have the status of pop stars and the response is very much like that. I am constantly amazed and impressed by the way the players cope with it. For a while I wondered why some of them didn’t respond to all these waving people and smiling faces and I realised they can’t afford to. Just to give a little bit of emotion to each person would drain them. So they really do just have to live in their own private little world as they are carried from hotel to ground, from ground to airport, from airport to plane, to the next airport and the next horde of waiting people all wanting a touch, a glimpse of their heroes.

“Players oblige as much as is humanly possible. Sachin Tendulkar, for example, is still the one who is most in demand and the way in which he just copes serenely with it is a lesson to us all. You know he gives what he can but he has learned that there is a limit. So he gives that much and then has to shut himself down. But we do realise our responsibility to a billion people, most of whom follow avidly the fortunes of the side. The passion we receive has no middle ground, no grey area. It teeters from one extreme to the other.

Are we discussing the same Sachin Tendulkar, who it is alleged, you have said lacked application on the field?

Mike Selvey writes…

“There was a very poignant photograph in the paper one day recently just before we played in Lahore. A lot of Indian supporters wanted to come to the match. Now they can cross the border but you have to drive there, then leave the car and walk across and get a car or bus the other side. It is a huge effort for many to support the team.

“The picture was of a woman, elderly, scrambling through the border. It is for people such as her that we are playing the game and the players and I realise that. We pinned the picture on the dressing room wall to remind us. We drew a lot of inspiration from that.”

Two days later,
after BCCI warned Greg Chappell in writing,
his friend Mike Selvey, wrote “
on the extraordinary reaction in India to his interview with Greg Chappell”.

How I knocked George Bush off the news

Friday March 3, 2006, The Guardian

It seemed there were two big stories in India yesterday. The first was George Bush’s state visit: global alliances, nuclear proliferation, all the trimmings. The second concerned me, or rather the interview with the national cricket coach Greg Chappell published in this paper on Wednesday. What should have been routine day covering the Test had turned into an ordeal by media with television, news-papers and websites hounding the press box for their slice.

The first signs of trouble came Wednesday evening as I was set to go out for dinner after the first day’s play in Nagpur. A call on the hotel house phone and a request for a quick chat about the interview. I obliged but on the understanding that we did not touch on the emotive subject of the former captain Sourav Ganguly.

First thing yesterday morning I tuned my television to a programme called Headlines Today, for whom I had done the interview, and discovered that my story and this newspaper’s part in it featured strongly after Bush’s visit, the top story.

The Chappell interview was one I had very much wanted to do. We have known each other for many years, and I was keen to find out how much he felt the responsibility of coaching a side that is the focal point in the lives of millions. He was just back from the tour of Pakistan but he had agreed for me to go to Bangalore where he lives and talk before he left for Baroda and team selection. So we played golf, had dinner and nattered: I got what I thought was an atmospheric piece describing a man who appreciated that the nature of his job transcended any other such in cricket.

Inevitably we talked, though not at great length, about his relationship with Ganguly. Their power struggle, which resulted in Chappell giving the captaincy to Rahul Dravid after a hugely acrimonious falling out on a recent tour to Zimbabwe, has provided a turbulent backdrop to the coach’s nine months in charge. Passions have run typically high as India divided into one camp or the other.

“A POWER STRUGGLE” that is what it was all along, wasn’t it?
What took him so long to admit the real reason.

Mike Selvey writes…

Much of what Chappell told me was documented. Some was not. Exception had been taken by some – including Ganguly – to a paragraph in which Chappell said he believed Ganguly’s influence was instrumental in getting him the post, how Ganguly was mistaken in believing Chappell would allow the then captain to “run him” and how it was only as their antipathy deepened that he began to realise how much the captaincy and playing for India meant in terms of Ganguly’s life and finances. Yesterday, after a complaint from Ganguly, Chappell received a letter from the Board of Control for Cricket in India telling him to “confine his comments to the performance of the team”.

At the ground, the hassle started and was to continue throughout the day.
“But you talk of Sourav Ganguly and . . .” “No, Mr Chappell does that. If you want comment you had better ask him.”

There was a frenzy in and around the press box. Why was the interview given to a western journalist rather than an Indian? Because I asked him and he said yes. Was the timing not sinister? No, I had just arrived in the country. Had he asked me to do it rather than the other way round? Starting to feel punchy.

Over the course of the next few hours my colleague David Hopps, having taken the role of press attachÃ(c), gave interviews to CNN and another TV station whose agenda was little more than to get me to pose with my tape recorder (“The Tape!”) and offered comment to numerous inquiring hacks who ought to have been looking elsewhere for their follow-up.

Some went as far as to question my integrity, which pissed me off a bit. Meanwhile, in West Bengal, a Mr Bhattacharya, minister for municipal affairs and urban development, known for “his proximity to Ganguly”, called for sports lovers to protest against Chappell, who had insulted not only his famous acquaintance but the state and the nation.

By mid-afternoon Dubya, who in an interview in the Times of India last week had confessed to being a “cricket match person”, had, I am told, been kicked off top spot on the bulletins. “It’s a great pastime,” he had said. Yeah, George. He probably thinks it’s hoops, mallets, tea and crumpets. Want to swap for the day?

Just one question Mr Chappell, why did you have to write a pile of rubbish
trying to portray Ganguly as physically and mentally unfit captain
who was faking injuries, when the true reason you got rid of him
was your paranoia (as above) and a power struggle?

Indian cricket would not have divided “into one camp or the other”
would not have been so fragmented today if you had simply stated the truth.

[Both articles have been quoted verbatim from the originals on Guardian UK.]