To be honest, Mumbai may have won the Ranji Trophy for the 35th time, but had it not been for the astute captaincy of Paras Mhambrey, ably supported by cunning coach Chandu Pandit, they would have possibly been relegated to the Plate group.
At the beginning of the season, the selection committee, headed by Dilip Vengsarkar, was struggling to find a batsman who could play out one session. How the Mumbai team managed to win most of their games outright is a mystery to the followers of the game.
The Mumbai think-tank was aware of the fact that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to score more than 350 in an innings. Apart from Wasim Jaffar and Vinayak Mane, the team didn't have a batsman in form who could get big scores.
In a four-day game, the team that can't score 350 runs has to rely on its bowlers. Mhambrey was shrewd enough to realize that his bowlers had to be reminded to bowl in the corridor of uncertainty consistently so as to make the opposition batsmen fight for every run. In the very first game of the season, when Mumbai was bundled out for a paltry 98 against Hyderabad, Mumbaikars, that evening, accepted the fact that Mumbai would struggle. However, Aavishkar Salvi's spell of quick bowling was enough to rattle the Hyderabadis. That possibly was the day the Mumbai players planned how to win their matches in this year's tournament.
Chandu Pandit believes in setting daily goals, written in bold letters on the blackboard, in the dressing room. "Apnaa Apnaa Kaam Karo [do what you're supposed to do]," was the key sentence when Sanjay Manjrekar was the captain. What Pandit did was let the players know what they were expected to do in a session. Once the communication link was established between the players and the team management, things moved smoothly.
The practice sessions, too, were meticulously planned, with practice starting at 11 in the morning. That was the way Pandit and Mhambrey wanted players to get used to the heat. And when the trainer was found to be lacking in commitment, he was promptly sacked.
The problem starts when you lose sight of the goal and get distracted by the critical comments of people in power. One of the senior selectors indulged in destructive criticism and snide asides throughout the season and, at times, it became unbearable for certain senior players to bear. That was the time the players regrouped themselves and decided to ignore critical comments.
Mhambrey is a matured captain who loves coaching. As a coach he is expected to be a patient listener, especially to the youngsters in the side. He did that job admirably well even as a captain.
Coach Pandit may have planned strategy, but if the captain can't handle a session, getting the right people to position themselves for making the bowlers effective, even Mike Brearley wouldn't have been able to succeed!
Mhambrey has been a colleague of Amol Muzumdar and Nilesh Kulkarni for more than a decade, and when one of them had to be dropped, it was he who had to take a decision. And he did in the interest of the side.
Ashok Mankad and Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the two former Mumbai players, always felt that the seniors in the Mumbai team concentrated more on getting into the Indian team and did not focus on doing well for Mumbai. This made Mhambrey react, saying if a player isn't ambitious enough to think of the India cap then he can't perform for the state, because only consistent performances in the national championships can attract the attention of the national selectors.
Unfortunately, only Aavishkar Salvi got selected for India, though two all-rounders, Sairaj Bahutule and Ramesh Powar, did exceedingly well.
On a scale of 1 to 10 -- with 10 being excellent, my rating of the Mumbai players would be:
Wasim Jaffar - 7
Vinayak Mane - 7
Amol Muzumdar - 5
Nishit Shetty - 7
Sairaj Bahutule - 9
Ramesh Powar - 9
Paras Mhambrey - 9
Ajit Agarkar - 8
Nilesh Kulkarni - 7
Aavishkar Salvi - 9
Vinayak Samant - 7
Bhavin Thakkar - 7
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