Sad end to a rocky marriage

When marriages end, even the happiest of them, they end badly. And this was never a happy marriage to begin with; in that sense, the circumstances of Greg Chappell's departure comes as no surprise.

Ever since Chappell won the coaching assignment some 23 months ago, armed with a vision he was picked for by a panel of eminent former Indian captains, controversy has dogged Indian cricket. He took over at a time when the Indian team was in a downward slide and it was assumed that his larger-than-life persona would not just arrest this slide but take Indian cricket to the next level.

However, for his way of thinking and working - distinct as it was from the Indian way, precisely the reason that he was hired - to have any effect, he needed the team, especially the senior group, to buy into his philosophy. That the team has not merely failed to go up to the next level but has come down a notch could have as much to do with this as it does with the assertion that Chappell failed as a man-manager and could not carry a group of diverse and difficult cricketers with him.

It didn't take a genius to work out that he would be the obvious scapegoat for India's failure at the World Cup. But it is mischievous to lay the blame for all ills squarely at his doorstep. "Team-spirit is a bit of an overrated word," Rahul Dravid once said in an interview, taking this writer by surprise. "When the team is winning the spirit is always good. When the spirit is good, the team wins, more often than not. But which comes first?" In this case the spirit, if at all present when Chappell took over, was considerably weakened.

And there came Chappell's first blind spot. Convinced that Indian cricket was strong enough, he was willing to plunge it into chaos for he believed that real clarity had a better chance of emerging from confusion rather than denial. When he wrote that scathing six-page email to the BCCI on Ganguly, knowing full well it could be leaked, he precipitated a change of captaincy that was clearly needed - Indian cricket needed the coach and captain to reading from the same page, and that happened with Dravid's elevation. Yet it should escape no one's attention that he had put his job on the line in doing so, standing for the principles he believed in.

The transition was messy - private arguments became public wars - leaving Dravid with a poisoned chalice. Therein came what is seen as Chappell's second flaw, and ironically Dravid's greatest strength. For the two, some things were non-negotiable. They made it clear that players would pick themselves - not be artificially propped up by selectors or the team management - and, apart from just runs and wickets, factors like a constant urge to improve, a hunger to excel, to do things the right way, would play a part.

There were some players whom the two probably felt had slipped into a comfort zone, did not display these attributes, and got the axe. But their young replacements, who had the right attitude - the Suresh Rainas and VRV Singhs - simply did not do enough to validate the theory that doing the right things would bring the right results.

What some players saw as a single-minded commitment to an ideology, others saw as a reflection of how inflexible Chappell was as a person, how fixed he was in his ideas and views, schoolmasterly in his approach. Chappell could counter that by pointing to a group of cricketers who were unused to being told what to do, were left untouched in success and failure, and largely believed they already knew all they needed to about cricket. And it's no coincidence which group, the youngsters or the seniors, were doing the most complaining, even in private.

The flashpoint of Chappell's tempestuous tenure was the dropping of Ganguly, the premise of which was that a Ganguly free of the burden of captaincy would emerge a stronger batsman. This was proved right when Ganguly returned from 14 months in the wilderness, before which his batting had fallen away to the point that even his loyalists in the team had lost faith in it. With Ganguly away, India won a record 18 one-day chases, and it was only much later, after the youth policy caved in, that the "experimentation" failed, the "process" was summarily discarded and the old guard recalled for the World Cup, leaving Chappell's hands all but tied.

Chappell pushed the players harder than they ever had been, physically and mentally, and some didn't take too kindly to this. The players were also enraged by the fact that Chappell was talking about his apprehensions, in confidence, to a variety of journalists - something his friends constantly warned against - but the damage was done when these tales reached the players.

That Chappell repeatedly failed to learn from these incidents was a serious error in judgment and cannot be glossed over. But that the players should take such umbrage, and blame this alone for destroying the harmony of the dressing-room is laughable, for they are past masters at manipulating the media to achieve their purposes, as the most recent sordid episode amply demonstrated.

Chappell leaving is not a tragedy. Someone will take his place, Indian cricket, and life, will go on. It is sad, though, that that things hadn't worked out between Indian cricket and Chappell. When a relationship breaks down and a dream dies, what really hurts is the fact itself, not whose fault it was. Perhaps the sceptics were right all along - Indian cricket and Chappell were just not meant to be -but an honest person would admit that it couldn't have failed solely because of one man's flaws.