The story that India’s cricket captains tell

Acute Angle

Watching the Indian cricket team these days is quite revelatory. I was at the Chinnaswamy Stadium recently to see them stroll to victory over a strong Australian side in a one-day game. Incredibly, towards the end, I felt my attention wandering because the result was never in doubt. Contrast this with the past, when a convincing win over a good side was such a rarity that one would sit through until the glorious end, and even watch the presentation ceremony in the afterglow. As it was, I left the minute Manish Pandey hit the winning runs, wanting to beat the rush out of the ground.

All this got me thinking. India are a team very much in the mould of their captain, Virat Kohli, though not one player in the side can hold a candle to the kind of quality he represents. This is unusual for India – most sides of the past two decades have had two or three players at any given time who could walk into the all-time great Indian Test team. Now, it is Kohli and the rest. Of the best of the rest, Rohit has yet to earn his Test spurs, and Rahul and Bumrah are (very good) works in progress.

Truth is, there is a replaceability about pretty much everybody in the team, and they all look the same: fighting fit, confident, mostly bearded and strangely colourless. The replaceability has in part got to do with the richness of cricketing talent and paucity of cricketing genius in the country; in some ways, it is understandable that the quality difference between players other than the captain has flattened out so much.

India’s Test captains tend to reflect the state of the nation. Go back to Pataudi, an inspirational leader at a time of scarce resources, both cricketing and otherwise. That was a time when victories in cricket and successes as a nation were like gold dust and fractiousness dominated: the focus was on keeping things together and jointly celebrating rare individual achievement. Wadekar was similar, pulling off the odd heist -- much like a dirt-poor country testing a nuclear device -- but disintegrating in a miserably cold English summer.

Gavaskar was well ahead of his pack but the accent remained on individual achievement (the peculiar Mumbai school that also produced Tendulkar, and that delights in personal statistics) and rubbing it in when we pulled one over our erstwhile colonial rulers; the nation and the team were prickly and this occasionally inspired them to play out of their skins. Kapil Dev could carry a steadily improving side. Azhar was delightful to watch but a mumbler whose aspirations for a (much) better life reflected what a hitherto sullen middle-class India wanted.

Fast forward to Ganguly, the most remarkable of the modern Indian captains, and cut to the balcony at Lord’s and a bare-torsoed skipper waving his shirt over his head to celebrate a victory. That was his middle finger to the cricketing establishment, until then dominated by the white countries: Apposite that this was Lord’s, an overrated epitome of stuffiness and Empire. If the earlier Indian teams were prickly, this was a far more confident prickliness backed by an ever-stronger team, built brick by brick. The odd display of silicon-valley-on-the-shoulder was quite enjoyable and the risks of it rebounding on you were reducing by the day. This was the steadily more solid India that Manmohan and Narasimha Rao built, and the captaincy of Ganguly’s successor, Dravid, reflected this understated but nevertheless fervent hunger for success.

Then came Dhoni, Captain Cool, a sort of monk who kept his Ferrari. Zen and drama combined. A superb one-day captain whose leadership would drift into strange passivity when things were going badly in a Test match, often in seaming English conditions. He was the India of the early to mid-2010s, very good in parts with the soft underbelly showing through every now and then.

But the great thing about Ganguly and Dhoni was actually not a great thing about Ganguly and Dhoni themselves, but the greats that somehow flowered on their watch. They came in different shapes and sizes. Tendulkar was a genius in everybody’s book, Dravid a consummate craftsman, Sehwag a once-in-a-lifetime matchwinner, and VVS was, well, VVS.

Kohli’s captaincy reflects a further evolution of the country (and not a sudden leap to greatness after 70 years of abject misery, as some would have us believe). This newest version is confident and brash. But there’s a suspicion of brittleness, much like with the fake-it-until-you-make-it nationalism of the day. The real test will be when Kohli’s own batting falters, as it will at some point. Is this a team filled with personality-less Kohli-lites who pass the yo-yo test with flying colours but may look horribly exposed in difficult conditions?

It’s worth noting that the true greats of the recent past would have looked out of place in today’s side. Imagine VVS sprinting a sharp single with Kohli, Ganguly chasing a ball as if his life depended on it or Sehwag buckling down to modern discipline. This side would never have accommodated a supremely skilled Gundappa Viswanath. The homogenisation of the side will be complete when poor Pujara and Ashwin are eased out.

I remember a former Unilever chairman noting that the most difficult diversity to manage was the diversity of styles. Kohli’s team – and may they continue to sweep all before them – runs the risk of continuing to reflect Indian society, a society that is being coerced, almost without its knowledge, into shunning any form of diversity.