Kohli, Ganguly and the captaincy mess

Rohit Mahajan

The Indian captain is upset. He believes that he’s being pushed out. At a

press conference, he announces: “I was asked to step down from captaincy before the Test began.”

It’s not Virat Kohli we’re talking about — it’s Sourav Ganguly. The year is 2005, the place is Zimbabwe, and captain Ganguly is angry. He’s in the midst of a bitter conflict with his own coach, Greg Chappell, variously described as megalomaniac, a control freak, a very manipulative person.

Now, in 2021, merely 16 years after that terrible affair — when a coach, by all accounts, seemed to be working against the team’s best players — we’re in

the midst of another leadership conflict.

What is most unfortunate about this sorry episode is that we have a cricketer in charge of the Indian cricket board (BCCI) — none other than Ganguly! In 2005, BCCI was palace of intrigue, with various powerful individuals trying to gain control of the presidentship. The time of Jagmohan Dalmiya — a Kolkata man, like Ganguly — was up, and Ganguly did not have a president who supported him.

Now we have Ganguly at top in BCCI. One would have thought that, surely, he would display empathy and kindness in dealing with requests from the players — and also with their insecurities, their tantrums, their form. That’s what he himself wanted as a player, didn’t he?

Kohli wanted to be captain of the Test and ODI team until the 2023 World Cup at least. While such a wish can’t be necessarily granted, it must be dealt with fairness and absolute transparency.

However, it’s clear that there’s no trust between Ganguly and Kohli — one of them is lying.

Ganguly has claimed that BCCI tried to persuade Kohli to reconsider his decision to give up captaincy of the national T20 team — and that it was only after he refused that he was sacked as captain of the ODI team.

Kohli summarily rubbished this claim in a press conference, creating a sensation — just as, 16 years ago, Ganguly had created a sensation by claiming that he was asked to give up captaincy before a Test.

Kohli is a very confident, self-aware person who feared nothing even as, in effect, he painted Ganguly as a liar. The ball is in Ganguly’s court, and today he merely said: “We’ll deal with it. Leave it to BCCI.”

Ganguly was the inspirational leader of India, the man with a national rather than parochial vision in team selection — the man who backed his men to the hilt. How is it, then, that under his watch, one of India’s greatest-ever claims he was summarily removed as captain and treated shabbily? The reign of a cricketer-president isn’t turning out to be particularly utopian, sad to say.