The Cult Of A Tiger
324–8. 2 more to win from 4 balls. Zaheer Khan is on strike. Andrew Flintoff who is just beginning to clean up the tail charges in. Zak with nary a backlift, plods the ball to covers, covers charges in, indulges a wild throw and the batsmen chance a second. A historic chase is completed! The tracer bullet goes wild. The captain comes out, takes his shirt off and twirls it around offering an exhibition of his anachronistically scrawny physique while mouthing off Shakespeare. Sourav Chandidas Ganguly. Dada. The Bengal Tiger. The prince of Calcutta. A leader of men whose inspirational leadership instilled belief in the team to keep fighting back against all odds to run down a record total of 326 from 146–5. The man who led India from the dark spectre of match fixing to become world beaters.
I’m sure you’ve read similar prose on this match that has become a venerated part of Indian cricketing folklore as it has about Ganguly. A common theme about articles and commentary on SG and his captaincy is that they mostly employ similar tone and wordsmanship. So much so that it has become a narrative unto itself. Narratives are self-fulfilling prophecies in that they are constantly reinforced by a feedback loop. And therefore, anything that does not ride this bandwagon is deemed an affront. Ask Greg Chappell.
About 3 years ago, I found an interesting twitter conversation on this subject that intrigued me. I decided to play devil’s advocate and dive into the rabbit hole. Was SG really an inspirational, aggressive captain who changed Indian cricket? I had myself digested years and years of media PR on this. I cheered on Ganguly when he took on a white man who tried to change Indian cricket. I was on Team Dada for 4 years of college and hostel against Team MSD. The more I dug in, the more I cringed at having picked his side all these years. The catchphrases that delineate SG’s leadership are inspirational, aggression, tactical genius or any linear combination of all three. But what did they actually entail?
Aggression/Tactical genius:
An oft repeated quality of SG’s captaincy is his aggression. My mind goes back to how India played a dated form of white ball cricket for about 5 years watching the world around move on. Or how India for years were averse to playing a 5th bowler to force results in tests. Or how India’s white ball teams were constantly top heavy. It is a wonderment as to what in his captaincy qualified as aggressive. Promoting Sehwag to the top is one argument. This however is a non starter. The middle order was full and the only slot open was at the top and Sehwag was too good to be left out. VVS Laxman was tried at the top on multiple occasions in the 90s before being pushed down the order, simply because he was too good to be left out. In fact, I do wonder at times whether India would have gotten more out of Sehwag and Dravid switching places, given Sehwag’s frailty against the new ball as is reflective of his record outside Asia. After all, 60–0 at lunch is definitely a better score than 90–2.
Moreover, for every Sehwag success story, there are several stories about SS Das, Deep Dasgupta, Parthiv Patel, Aakash Chopra et al who were tried and shunted out. Good young players get backed all the time and this is not something unique to SG that previous Indian captains did not do. In fact, Yuvraj’s is a curious case in that his career is largely attributed to SG and yet his career really only took off post Ganguly. Players of a certain batch routinely talk about how Ganguly backed them simply because they get asked about it thereby feeding the narrative. Nobody ever asks today’s batch of players whether Dhoni backed them because, well… that’s not a narrative. Attributing the success of a few players to something touted to be uniquely inspirational reeks of availability heuristic. In the same breath, one wonders what could be said about Azhar, under whom Dravid, VVS and SG himself cut their teeth.
Another gaping issue in India’s white ball team back in the day was issues with chasing. One of the Achilles heels that came to the fore repeatedly were positions 4–8. Apart from handing Dravid the gloves and pushing Sachin to 4, I can’t think of any other ideas that were routinely sustained to address the issue. Dravid-Chappell, of WC 2007 fame, on the other hand, pushed Dhoni, who batted mostly at the top order at the domestic level to the lower middle order to force the issue along with Yuvraj and Dravid himself. They also cultivated a player in Raina who would go on to become a middle order enforcer in Dhoni’s team. Dravid decided to tackle the chasing problem head on and elected to chase every single time regardless of conditions. Whether that created Dhoni/Yuvraj the finisher or vice versa is a chicken and egg argument but Indian cricket reaped its benefits for another 6 years. This gave an insight into Dravid’s thinking as captain and his predeliction for pace power hitters in the middle order, a tactic he would go onto employ years later at the IPL and U-19. Apart from this, Irfan’s batting potential was harnessed to play 5 bowlers in both formats repeatedly. Under Ganguly, Irfan seldom played above 7. Dravid took actual material risks to better the team. The same cannot be said of Ganguly.
Inspirational:
The whole personality cult around Ganguly being inspirational was built around 2 or 3 “mass” moments during his captaincy — The Border-Gavaskar 2001 series (where he made Steve Waugh wait at the toss for crying out loud!), the 2002 Natwest shirtless moment and the 2003 WC where a middling ODI team punched above its weight to make it to the finals (and beat Kenya twice!). Basically, 3 “mass” moments around what was a middling 5 year period at best. But what does the actual record say? India under SG played 110 ODIs vs non-minnows, won 45 and lost 60. It is the worst record for any captain in the last 30 years, barring Sachin. The corresponding numbers for other contemporaries are: Azhar (P139 W67 L67), Dravid (P71 W35 L32), Dhoni (P179 W93 L71) and Kohli (P74 W50 L24). The actual record if anything shows that SG’s team was a step down from even Azhar’s. SG is often touted to have instilled fighting spirit in the team. Nothing is more antithetical to that theory than India’s particularly galling record under SG in multi-nation finals. India’s only win in a final was the Natwest final … out of 14 finals. Both Azhar and MSD’s teams won more finals than they lost.
A forgotten aspect of India’s ODI record under SG was how badly the team fell off a cliff after the 2003 WC. Post 2003 WC to mid 2005 when his captaincy ended, India’s record against top 8 teams reads: P64 W20 L34. This is only better than WI. In the 2 years that followed under Dravid, India were the 3rd best ODI team and the 2nd best test team. The team’s white ball rise truly began under Dravid-Chappell with multiple lead actors in the CB series 2008 win and the WC 2011 win being players who came to the fore under the duo. The era however ended up being a PR disaster, so much so that SG was recalled into the side for the WC where he sucked the life out of every innings he batted in.
SG’s own form fell off a cliff before the WC. He averaged 25 against Top 8 sides until he got phased out in mid 2005. That’s two and a half years of dead weight. Any “inspirational” leader would have stepped aside for the betterment of the side. Mark Taylor comes to mind. You only need to read Chappell’s leaked email for evidence on how SG tried his best to cling on while being the albatross that asphyxiated the team. Chappell tried to institute this change only for the PR propaganda to take over. SG’s cult grew and grew while he continued to be deemed surplus to the team. It peaked with a Pepsi commercial with him sitting alone in a stadium beseeching the camera “Mera naam Sourav Ganguly. Bhoole tho nahi?”(My name is Sourav Ganguly. Hope you haven’t forgotten me.)
Really?
So one wonders, from where exactly does Ganguly’s captaincy cult germinate? Perhaps the cable TV/private news media boom that transpired in the late 90s? There was a “desh ki dhadkan" ad campaign by Hero featuring SG that married his captaincy with chest-thumping nationalism. Or the cult of Lagaan, which released just months after that Australia series and what passed for memes back then around Ganguly/Bhuvan?
It continues to this day when the media played cheerleader to the news of Ganguly becoming BCCI president — grossly letting slide the fact that this was Jay Shah and N Srinivasan puppeteering Indian cricket once again rolling back each one of Lodha’s reforms. And then you look at the actual record and there is little empirical evidence that points to SG changing Indian cricket. “sTaTs ArE nOt EvErYtHiNg" is a common and asinine argument. The epistemic assessment of anything in life, let alone a cricketing record, is dictated by its descriptive data. If you aren’t talking about the record, you aren’t talking about cricket.
This article is not an exercise on whether or not Ganguly was a great captain — I’ll let you decide that for yourself, but more on whether the cult around it befits the actual record.
And this cult is a hollow one, the support of which, data, there is none.
