Captaining team India

Captaining the Indian cricket team has often been referred to as the second most difficult position to handle behind the post of Prime minister in India. I guess even the prime minister’s actions are not monitored to a degree as the Indian captain’s are on the field.

Ganguly’s place in the side was always in question after the world cup, but it took the new coach Greg Chappell to spill the beans; for which he paid the price. Poor guy, he never knew that popularity and not performance gives a player a berth in the team. There has been a lot of debate on the captaincy issue and here are my views on it.

Ganguly is an aggressive player who goes by his instincts, while Dravid is a very intelligent cricketer, who is very calculative, planned, and plays by the rules. Ganguly’s aggressiveness brought him a lot of success, and people cite his victories as his strong point. What ganguly brought then was a whiff of fresh air after the Azhar era. Azhar was the most successful captain India had, but even then he had to be replaced (even before the match fix scandal), same goes for ganguly, he might have served the country but then it is time to move on. Dravid may not prove to be a better captain than ganguly statistically, but he is the best man at the moment to do the job. Also, statistics show that most of the test victories for ganguly had a major contribution from dravid. And given his mental soudness chances of captaincy burden affecting his performance are low.

Dravid has been the media guy right from the latter part of ganguly’s captaincy and his sound knowledge and belief of what he is doing is always reflected in his words. His luck is shining for him with a series victory to start with, but he always talks about building a team for the world cup rather than winning now. This might be just the team to win it considering that Tendulkar and Dravid might make their last world cup appearance and given their passion for the game would give everything to bring the cup back home. Here’s wishing them the best of luck to realize their dream and ours.