BOMBAY, 29 March — It was quite interesting to read in the same newspaper, interviews of two spinners — one with 400 plus wickets in Test cricket and another with a fabulous start to his Test career but going into virtual international oblivion after that. What was interesting was to read how both, one an off-spinner and the other a leg-spinner, differed on the role of the captain vis-a-vis spin bowlers. The off spinner of course is Muttiah Muralitharan who has reached 400 wickets faster than anyone else and the leg spinner — Narendra Hirwani who made a sensational entry into Test cricket capturing 16 wickets on debut. Muralitharan has of course very little to complain about life having just won the coveted Ceat International Cricketer of the Year Award for 2000-2001 and well on his way to get the title again this year too. Hirwani on the other hand didn’t play too many Tests after that and if memory serves one right had just two more five-wicket hauls in a Test innings after that eight wickets in each innings-debut he made against Viv Richards’ West Indies in 1987-88.
Hirwani felt that he had not been handled well by captains he played under and thus was not able to get anywhere close to bowling like he did in his first Test. Murali on the other hand opined that it did not matter who the captain was, for it was the bowler who thought about how to get the batsman out, his weakness and how to exploit it and to set a field to trap the batsman. Two completely opposite views and before one discards Hirwani’s views since he is not a fraction successful as Muralitharan, don’t forget that one is a leg-spinner and the other an off-spinner. By the very nature of their spin bowling craft, the finger spinner is more likely to have better control rather than the wrist spinner and this is where captaincy comes in.
Teams that have plenty of runs on the board can afford to have a few loose overs from a bowler but a team that struggles to put enough runs to defend is always worried when there is even one expensive over. It is here that captaincy becomes important if a bowler is to bowl without worrying whether he will get to bowl the next over if he gives a boundary in the over he is bowling. But then this probably applies to all bowlers and not just spin bowlers.
Hirwani’s magical moment came under the captaincy of Ravi Shastri who unfortunately not just for the leg-spinner but also Indian cricket led the team only once.
Ravi’s leadership qualities were evident even when he led the Indian Under-19 and then the Indian Under-25 teams but Indian cricket politics and the lobbying by some media-persons ensured he never captained India again which was Indian cricket’s loss in much the same way as M.L. Jaisimha never captaining India and Chandu Borde captaining India in just the odd Test. Ashok Mankad who himself was a brilliant captain swears by the leadership of Chandu Borde and that’s a good enough testimonial as far as I am concerned.
Hirwani is not the only bowler to feel that he did not get a sympathetic captain for before him there were Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Maninder Singh, two outstanding young prospects who looked like world beaters but somehow never lived up to their potential. Again like in Hirwani’s case, it was not simply a question of an understanding captain but other factors as well that didn’t help their careers grow, and if they are brutually honest, they will admit that themselves but yes, again a good captain could have helped them get over their problems, cricketing and otherwise, and perhaps Indian cricket would have had more victories to show.
The fading away of ‘Siva’ and ‘Manni’ was a personal disappointment to me because they came into the Indian side for the first time under my captaincy. In a sense these two, Ravi, Sadanand Viswanath and Manoj Prabhakar were ‘my boys’ and while Prabhakar with his determination and temperament ensured he had a fairly long career, the others fell by the wayside. May be because they were perceived to be ‘my boys’. Of course, Ravi had established himself in the Indian team by the time I left the captaincy and was a vital cog in the Indian cricket machinery but the others were still relatively new and thus easily sidelined after just one or two failures, which was a real pity.
It must be said that it is easy to captain a bowler like Muralitharan for he loves to bowl long spells and is a fantastic fielder to boot. The fact that he also is the leading bowler in the team means the captain relies heavily on him to pick the wickets. He is therefore ensured of a decent spell that will give him all the scope to experiment with his various deliveries. It’s this confidence of a long spell that is the difference between a bowler willing to get hit for a few runs and who will thus try all his bag of tricks and a bowler who is not sure whether he will get another over if he concedes a boundary or two. The other factor one has to consider is how certain the captain himself is of his own position. If he too feels he is on trial then he is obviously not going to give long spells to bowlers who he feels are going to be a bit expensive, but if like Jayasuriya is at the moment the only candidate for the Sri Lankan captaincy then he will be quite happy to try out different methods and tactics with the confidence that he will get another chance in the next game.
At the end it boils down to temperament and even in a team game like cricket, the individual temperament can and does make a difference. A player who is determined and disciplined in his approach to the game will be able to come through even if he has an ordinary captain, for his survival instinct is such. But if you don’t have that survival instinct and there is a looseness about your game, then make sure you are not looked at as being one of the captain’s boys, for as soon as the captain goes, you go too. By all means be good to the captain but don’t get labeled as his ‘boy’.
Else you may end up like Ravi Shastri’s boy Hirwani did.
