Prem Panicker

Gangly Sourav Chandidas Ganguly: three Tests, six innings, 106 runs at an average 17.67, a highest score of 48 and a contribution, over the series, of 5.6 per cent of the team's total.

That is the sum of Ganguly's quantifiable contribution to the team, in the just concluded home series against Australia (as with the earlier analysis of the team, we are staying, here, with Tests -- since it is Test cricket that will hold centrestage for most of the season to follow).

During India's last tour of Australia, in the 1999-2000 season, Ganguly again played three Tests (six innings) for an aggregate of 177, a highest of 66, and a contribution of 14.3 per cent of the team effort.

Based on those statistics, it would be fair to say that Ganguly is not at his best and brightest against Australia, whether at home or away.

While commenting on Ganguly's lean trot during the recent series, a former Test star in his column in a national newsmagazine wrote: "I sometimes wonder how Ganguly faces his mates during the team meetings."

Good question -- in the answer to which lies the real analysis of Ganguly's contribution to a team effort that saw India win two Tests out of three against an all-conquering Australian side that came here hell-bent on subjugating 'the Final Frontier'.

Australia's game plan has, for some time now, revolved around some tried and tested concepts. Chief among them is 'mental disintegration' -- and the formula is spelt out thus: Take out the opposing captain, by any and all available means, and the team will crumble around him.

This tactic, against the Indians under Sachin Tendulkar during the last tour Down Under, worked to perfection. Tendulkar was 'taken out' by a variety of means we don't need to reiterate at this point, given that it is all so well documented -- and the team folded, without a semblance of a fight.

The same tactic was employed during the just-concluded home series -- with Ganguly, not Tendulkar, as the target. The means? Anything and everything that came to hand: constant vulgar abuse by all members of the Australian team, and incessant digs at his turbulent personal life, the whole buttressed, beefed up, added to and exacerbated by a co-operative Australian media that, not to mince words, wrote some gawdawful crap (the media's role, again, is the subject of an article slated for tomorrow, so we won't go too deeply into that here).

Did any of the Indians ask Shane Warne if he had been telephoning some interesting nurses lately? No. Did any of them ask Michael Slater what his wife, now estranged and in the middle of a bitter divorce battle, was up to these days? No. Did anyone ask Ganguly about his reported liaison with a tinsel star? The Aussies did -- all the time, and not always in the most parliamentary language.

It was the 'mental disintegration' theory employed, at full throttle, by a team that believes that no holds are barred.

And? Did Ganguly 'mentally disintegrate'? Did his team collapse around him?

You would have to say, when examining that question with due objectivity, that the answer is 'No'.

Face it, the team played outstanding cricket and won against an opponent not easily beaten. Thus, if the theory that subduing the captain leads to the collapse of the team is true, then you have to grant that the corollary is equally true -- the team did not collapse, and credit for that has in some measure to go to the captain.

As a batsman, he did not cut it, true. Equally true that Ganguly has a very visible, very obvious, flaw in his technique when playing the short rising ball. A flaw that was exploited brilliantly by the Australian bowlers, a flaw that would have been noted, for future exploitation, by India's upcoming opponents over what promises to be a very long, very strenuous season.

Step back a moment, though, and rifle through the leaves of memory. Remember a certain Jimmy Amarnath? Who, during one home series against the West Indies, laid more ducks than an entire poultry farm? What is said about Ganguly today is what was said about Amarnath then -- and the sequel to the Amarnath story is too well known to require repetition here.

The point behind that little aide memoire is this -- if we can, and do, see that flaw, is it way off base to assume that Ganguly would have, too? Is it, then, a touch premature to write off Ganguly the batsman, without waiting to see if he, like Jimmy Amarnath before him, can recalibrate his cricket and cope with the challenge?

You can write off Ganguly the batsman. And wonder "how he faces his mates in team meetings". Or you can view him as a work in the making -- and if that is the right perspective, then the last word on Ganguly's batting will need to be written around July 2002, by which time India would have gone through away series against the likes of South Africa, the West Indies and England, not to mention the immediate away series against Zimbabwe and several home series as well.

What then of Ganguly the captain, on the field of play? During the series under review, there were times when he got it right, and times when he got it wrong. For starters, you cannot but question his publicly stated theory that India can, and should, win with seam. There is no real problem with win-with-seam as a policy per se -- the trouble comes when you tend to confuse a pea-shooter with a Bofors bandook.

Equally susceptible to criticism is the mindset (and here, John Wright must be deemed to be equally guilty) that you can and should attack only at one end. This theory was seen at its very worst in Madras where, on a pitch that had exploitable cracks and afforded turn and bounce, Nilesh Kulkarni was asked to go around the wicket and, with a seven-strong on-side field, bowl two feet or more outside the batsman's leg stump while Harbhajan Singh attacked at the other end.

Begs the question -- in conducive conditions, what exactly is the harm in attacking at both ends anyway?

Ganguly's field placings -- especially the tendency to place the fielders too deep and present struggling batsmen with easy singles -- has also, rightly, come in for question. But that in turn begs the question -- which Indian captain in the last decade has shown skill in this department? The answer, sadly, is none -- so perhaps it would be truer to say that this is an Indian virus, not one that afflicts Ganguly alone. It would be equally to the point to extend this a bit and make the point that after Mansur Ali Khan of Pataudi, Sunil Gavaskar and to a lesser extent Ajit Wadekar, we haven't produced any great spin-generals.

Cumulative point -- Ganguly, captain-on-the-field, has been no better than his immediate predecessors. But then, neither has he been any worse. And that seems to suggest that Ganguly the captain is not the obvious candidate for the axe that he is being assumed to be.

If, then, you admit that the scales thus far are balanced dead even, then the deciding factor has to be an evaluation of Ganguly as a leader of men. And here, any objective analysis has to give him a high score.

As a leader, his first, and greatest, contribution to the team effort this series has to be the way in which he stood up to a champion team's concerted efforts to precipitate his mental collapse. In the way he took it all on the chin, gave back as good as he got, and in the process ensured that the rest of the side was shielded, to a good extent, from bearing the brunt of the Australian policy of 'mental disintegration'.

In that sense, Ganguly was India's stalking horse -- the man drew the fire, while his mates, from his shadow, did what they had to do.

Much has been written of Ganguly's 'gamesmanship', of his 'brattish behaviour'. What was that phrase again? -- 'the problem child of international cricket'?

His gesture aimed at a section of spectators -- and we won't go into the unasked, but important, question of what provoked it, here -- is regrettable. More, it deserves condemnation from all quarters.

Having said that, could we, please, quit swallowing the unmitigated crap that is being written in the foreign media about his on-field behaviour? For years now, Indians have been screaming themselves hoarse against the anything-goes tendency in modern cricket. Each time we protest against such behaviour, we are told that we are head-in-the-clouds types who are not in touch with the modern era.

This might be the moment to remember a famous quote: "Stop whingeing, cricket is a hard game. If you can't stand the heat you have no business being in the kitchen."

Those words were spoken by Steve Waugh, during India's last tour Down Under, when Australian umpiring, and Australian gamesmanship, was beginning to get the team down.

So when India walks into the kitchen, everyone wants to shift right back to the kiddies' nursery?

Indian cricket finally woke up to what the rest of the world has been telling it all along -- that it is a hard game, that there are no rules except to do whatever it takes to win. And Ganguly was the man who gave the wake-up call -- so what the heck is everyone beefing about now? I mean, the Aussies can -- and did -- beef, but that is because they played the game that way and came up against someone who played it better. What I don't understand is the national outcry right here -- could it be, as some players believe, that it is an orchestrated outcry, sponsored by an individual or individuals who found themselves losing out, financially, when Ganguly reoriented his endorsement and business strategies?

Secondly -- and given the structure of Indian cricket, this point assumes enormous importance -- he showed both the ability, and the willingness, to step to the line and fight for his players. and nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Harbhajan Singh.

At the start of the tour, 'Bajju' was a no-hoper -- the national selectors intended to drop him, his so-called 'indiscipline' at the National Cricket Academy being touted as the reason. It was Ganguly who fought -- and bitterly, at that -- to ensure that the young offie was picked. In the light of subsequent events, it has to be said that this alone is worth celebrating him for. Not, mind you, only because Harbhajan was a success -- but because standing up for a player against the national selectors is unprecedented in recent memory.

That way lies cricketing suicide. Ask Sachin Tendulkar, whose problems began when he publicly wondered why despite his stated request, the selectors didn't give him an off-spinner for the Caribbean tour. Ganguly ran the same risk, only more so -- after all, enormous though his public image is, he is still no Tendulkar, and that makes him easier for the selectors to go after. Knowing that, and still taking them on, is an aspect of his leadership that I believe has not been adequately acknowledged, even applauded.

One other aspect needs highlighting at the fag end of this review -- namely, that Ganguly, unlike his immediate predecessors, has been amenable to suggestions emanating from others.

There was some criticism during the Bombay Test that Sachin Tendulkar, for one, was being marginalised. Check out videotapes of Calcutta and Madras and you will find that time and again, the captain went out of his way to seek Tendulkar's opinions on the field. If the Bombay marginalisation deserved mention, then why is the turnaround being ignored, pray? Similarly, it was Wright's idea to promote Laxman to three -- and captains in the past have been inclined to resist such suggestions, vehemently at times.

Revert to the question asked by that columnist: How does he face his team-mates?

Ask his mates, and they will tell you that he faces them with confidence. A confidence that stems from the fact that he now has their respect. They know better than most just what it took to take on the Australians -- and they believe that Ganguly acquitted himself very well on that front.

And perhaps it is in this that the recent tour has seen the real development of Ganguly -- into a leader his team is now prepared to respect, to stand by, and to fight like hell for, on the field of play, when he asks them to.

Let's go with that -- the rest, like field settings and coping with the rising deliveries -- can be learnt in time.