Did The "Process" Fail?

We came across this article from Rahul Bhattacharya while surfing a cricket message board. If the premise is true (that of distrust) then the article carries some weight.

The Process and why it failed so miserably
Rahul Bhattacharya

Four years ago to the day India crashed out of a World Cup. Then it was then the final. Now, bar a fresh face here and there, those same men, pale shadows of their former selves, hang their hopes on the cuddly amateurs of Bermuda, otherwise growing accustomed to the greatest embarrassment of their cricketing lives. ‘You ain’t going back home,’ a drunk hollered jauntily, almost as if to console them, ‘they gon kill yuh’.

Insofar as this can be analysed as a match of cricket it may be said, as the captain and coach said on loop while facing the press, that India “did not play well”. The seam bowlers were sharp upfront but they were unlucky, the fielding was mediocre and the batting hopeless.

Pitifully it all unravelled finally, the feebleness of despairing men unable to face the heat, and the campaign that had blazed across televisions, hoardings, powerpoint presentations and a million dreams came to a virtual halt. The world will turn, but try telling that to the Indian fan.

The cricketers will take a roasting, and there is little really to commend their efforts for the past year. The batting has been frail and the bowling medium and the fielding almost superfluous. Of course it has. And let us not even start on the system that produces and manages these cricketers. Yet, if we must be current, it is too convenient to ignore the point that this was a side without a chemistry. The only hope for it galvanising lay in the bonding that comes from special triumphs. It was not to be.

The team that is not united will find it hard to win. Rahul Dravid is an admirable cricketer in every respect, a setter of examples, but his fatal deficiency as captain was the inability to bring together people in a manner that makes them bigger than they are, a task made almost impossible by the politician employed as the coach.

When responding to one of the few questions he deigned to answer at the press conference, Greg Chappell pointed to the lack of partnerships. It could well be the motif for his tenure.

Numerous players earned the coach’s greatest censure and time after time he found friends in the media, in awe of his stature, thrilled by the access he provided, to spread the message. They were flamed privately to the press men. Word would get back to players, many of them could not relate to his methods anyway. Bonds were broken, and ultimately there hardly remained one. It is not there was not a shred of validity in the observations. But when there is such a breakdown of trust in a team its very spirit dies. India needed a leader, a builder; they got a wrecking ball.

From a tactical point of view, a shake-up was very much required when Dravid and Chappell came together. But experimentation was taken a step too far. It is one thing to make a flexible line-up, another to bend it till it breaks. It was going to be all or nothing. You could have an answer for every situation and equally to none. When it came down to it, the team was without a single bankable position.

The analysis has only just begun. It will continue with numbing force for months to come in what, for fans and media alike over the past two years, has been the most polarised period in recent Indian cricket history.

But take some time out to look the other way. As the world-weary Indians watched impassive from the dressing room, the jubilant Sri Lankans bounced joyously off the field, and the eager teenagers of the Bangladesh cricket team beamed in the audience. “The beauty and the cruelty of sport”, Dravid would philosophise later. Till better times, the supporters of the biggest, most decadent cricket playing nation in the world must have to come to terms with that.

Any thoughts?