Indian cricket and its game of thrones

Before Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, there were Sachin Tendulkar and Mohammad Azharuddin. Go further back in time and there were Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev and M.A.K. Pataudi and Ajit Wadekar. And these are just some examples of contemporaries who became captains in their time.

If you walk by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) headquarters in Mumbai, or should we say Motera, you might hear strains of the Game of Thrones tune.

The latest of Indian cricket’s captaincy dramas has unfolded in the last few days. Rohit Sharma has replaced Virat Kohli in all of white-ball cricket (T20 and 50 overs). This was expected, yet there is a huge fuss and discussion over the move. This is partly due to the non-transparent and high-handed way in which the BCCI has gone about the transition.

It is often like this with big decisions in Indian cricket. Only the cast changes, the intrigue and debate don’t.

Before Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, there were Sachin Tendulkar and Mohammad Azharuddin. Go further back in time and there were Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev and MAK Pataudi and Ajit Wadekar. And these are just some examples.

Also read: Lose the dressing room, lose the captaincy. Is that what happened with Virat Kohli?

To understand what an Indian cricket captain has meant over the years, it is important to put Indian cricket in perspective.

People wrongly assume that the Indian Premier League (IPL) was the turning point in Indian cricket’s popularity and economic growth. While it has indeed been one of the inflection points, the wheels for it were set in motion by a number of events in the preceding years.

One was the Ajit Wadekar-led team’s victories in England and the West Indies in 1971. The other is India’s 1983 World Cup win, and then in the 1985 World Championship of Cricket. WorldTel’s deals with Sachin Tendulkar and then with the BCCI in the '90s were also gamechangers, as they took player earnings, telecast quality and TV rights money to hitherto unseen levels in India. The IPL followed all these.

The 1980s were the first time Indian masses had a television in their homes. Magazines and newspapers were booming. That meant advertising was booming too, in print and electronic media.

Gavaskar and Kapil were the superstars of this generation. Though Gavaskar is older than Kapil by a full decade, the younger man quickly became one of the team’s mainstays. The captaincy changed hands between the two a few times from the early to mid-1980s. And often there was debate and discussion around it, especially as there were rumours of tension between the two at some point. The only Test Kapil missed in his 16-year career was when he was dropped for the Kolkata Test against England in 1984 for playing a reckless shot in the previous Test. Gavaskar was the captain then. The shocking decision to drop a player of Kapil’s stature was attributed to him. But Gavaskar has denied the charge, saying that while he was the captain and did attend the selection meeting, he had no vote in it, nor would he be foolish enough to drop a matchwinner.
Both Gavaskar and Kapil are generous in each other’s praise now and insist reports of their differences were exaggerated.

Another time the Indian captaincy made news was when Dilip Vengsarkar was sacked. After receiving a hammering from the West Indies in 1989, the players had gone on to the US to play a few masala matches, as they were called. At a time when the game did not pay as well as it did today, a free holiday in the US along with some semi-serious matches to satisfy homesick non-resident Indians (NRIs) was a good deal for the players. But the Board wasn’t happy.

Vengsarkar had been one of the best players in the world the preceding couple of seasons. Golf and tennis like computer rankings, newly introduced in cricket at the time, placed him at No. 1 for a period of 21 months. But the summer of ’89 weren’t the best days of his life.

One more intriguing chapter in Indian cricket captaincy occurred in January 1971. Ajit Wadekar was out shopping for curtains. When he returned home, fans carrying laddoos and garlands told him he had replaced MAK Pataudi as the team boss.

The circumstances of the decision were CIA-like. According to an article in The Telegraph, at the meeting of the five-member selection committee, one selector, East Zone’s M.N. Dutta Roy, was strangely absent. The remaining four votes were divided. C.D. Gopinath (South Zone) and M.M. Jagdale (Central Zone) were for Pataudi to continue. Bal Dani (North Zone) and Vijay Merchant (West Zone) were for Wadekar. With the vote locked at 2-2, Merchant used his powers as chairman of selectors to install his man.
“I was taken aback… If somebody had to replace Pataudi, I’d assumed it would be Chandu Borde… Nobody had remotely suggested I was in the running,” Wadekar told The Telegraph.

There was speculation that Merchant’s decision stemmed from his grouse with Pataudi’s father.

Pataudi was a royal, although an atypical one in that he valued cricketing merit and not lineage. Wadekar was a middle-class Maharashtrian. Whatever rivalry the two may have had, they seemingly did not let it come in the way of their commitment to the team. When Pataudi led India to its first Test series win abroad—in New Zealand in 1968—Wadekar was the top-scorer.

Wadekar also justified his captaincy by leading India to two famous triumphs in the West Indies and England in 1971. Pataudi, too, got his chance in the sun again, when he returned as captain in 1974.

Let us skip ahead a few years. In the early 1990s, Azharuddin emerged as a candidate for captaincy. K. Srikkanth, Vengsarkar and Kapil were nearing the end of their careers or had had their turn. It was around this time that one of the most famous lines in Indian cricket was reportedly spoken. Raj Singh Dungarpur, the then BCCI president and a romantic by nature, offered the throne to Azhar with a poetic, “Miya, captain banoge?”

Azhar accepted, presumably with his trademark head bobble and shrug of the shoulders. Once a shy, conscientious Hyderabadi who became a sensation by scoring three consecutive centuries on debut, Azhar, however, fell to the lure of dirty money. The much younger Sachin Tendulkar, whose integrity and ability were never in doubt, became captain. But he didn’t always get the team he wanted. Besides, some players in the team had sold out. Tendulkar then chose to concentrate on his batting, paving the way for Sourav Ganguly to become Dada.