India accepts the unconventional player today, and that is a major change

Whether Shane Warne was the greatest spinner of all time is a matter of opinion, and if Sunil Gavaskar felt Warne wasn’t even the best he had seen, he is entitled to his opinion, even if his timing let him down, which he regretted.

The more telling portion of his television interview with Rajdeep Sardesai was where he said of Warne that “he was always looking to live life fully, king size as they call it and he did that and maybe because he lived life in such a manner is perhaps the reason why his heart couldn’t take it and he passed away so soon.”

An old Indian bias

He was articulating an old Indian bias, one that has been handed down through generations: that to be a good sportsman, you ought to be a ‘decent’ person who didn’t smoke or drink or live life king size. At least not in public, anyway. Players of Gavaskar’s time and earlier who were conscious of their public image (and most were) were careful to appear pure as the driven snow. If you drank, you did it on the sly, and likewise if you smoked.

It is possible that had Warne been an Indian, he might not have played international cricket. To be kicked out of the cricket academy at age 20 would have sealed his fate; to have finished with one for 150 in his first Test would have sidelined him even amidst calls that leg spinners take longer to mature than any other type of bowler.

Things began to change in the new century, but there is no telling how many talented players were lost to Indian cricket because they appeared rough or were caught smoking or even grew their hair long.

I remember an awards ceremony at University where a long-haired player (who had won a major award) was told by the chief guest, a senior cricket board official: “Go have a haircut, you are not Sunil Gavaskar!”The two messages in that short sentence were: Long hair is bad. You are not a great player like Gavaskar to do as you please. The interesting thing was that the admonished player was already a First Class cricketer.

India produced (or wanted to produce) cookie-cutter players with similar defensive strokes, similar drives or cuts, and similarly unblemished behaviour records. We were overcoached as players and over-advised as human beings. And we had no system of mentorship or man-management to ensure that talented players who were different didn’t slip through the system.

Tiger Pataudi often said his one regret as captain was that he couldn’t get the best out of Salim Durrani, the man dubbed ‘wayward genius’. Pataudi believed that if you were good enough to play for India, you were good enough to handle your own problems.

Mavericks in the midst

The mavericks in a team had to hope that their captain would be more understanding than the system which produced them.

That is why Harbhajan Singh, who had been expelled from the National Cricket Academy, played over one hundred Tests. He had the support of his captain Sourav Ganguly.

Later ‘bad boys’ Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma were persisted with under M S Dhoni, and now both have led India, and shown a similar understanding of players outside the cookie-cutter system. It has seen two unorthodox but exciting talents, Jasprit Bumrah and Rishabh Pant prosper.

This has been a significant change in Indian cricket in the last quarter century or more, this acceptance that players can have different temperaments and different ways of doing things but they could be as valuable to the team as the gentlemanly players who embody the coaching manual. Not coincidentally, the period marked the shift from official-power to player-power.

Had Vinod Kambli, a gifted player whom nobody understood or wanted to understand, played under later captains, he might have had a longer and more productive career. Whatever the opposition, whatever home advantages, you can’t score successive double centuries in Tests without being out of the ordinary.

I think the same goes for Sadanand Viswanath too, a brilliant wicketkeeper who could have developed into a hard-hitting batsman but was not of the ‘yes sir, yes sir, three bags full’ school of cricket, meaning he didn’t suffer fools gladly even if some of the fools were seniors or officials.

Perhaps the teenage sensation Laxman Sivaramakrishnan belongs there too. Players pick up a reputation for being difficult or different, and the label stuck.

Warne was fortunate to have Allan Border in his corner, and once he matched his talent with performance, there weren’t too many dissenting voices. Someone — a selector, the captain, a senior player — should be willing to back talent for such players to succeed.

Ganguly understood this, as did Dhoni and Kohli, and Indian cricket gained as a result.