Indian cricket needs a visionary like Louis Gerstner to bring about turnaround

By Rohit Gore

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What next? That’s the question the key stakeholders of Indian cricket must now be asking? The year that went by was that kind of year for India. A massive and magical high of winning the World Cup, where they were expected to do well, followed by unfathomable and gut-wrenching deterioration of their Test performances. After the dust settles down on another humiliating and scarring defeat in Sydney, the Indian team still has to turn up for a Test match a week later – like a student expected to study very hard for the next paper immediately after he has miserably fared in one subject.

Around this time four years back India were in a similar situation. But then, they weren’t supposed to lose the Sydney Test. It had been a thriller, Indians were at the wrong end of some pathetic umpiring decisions, and all the drama that had happened had affected them more than it had affected Australians, because one of them had been accused of doing something that the Indians the world over have suffered time and again – a racist attack. This Test was devoid of any of that. If anything, the Indians had survived a few close lbw decisions and some spilled chances too.

Sometimes you just keep losing. Match after match after match, you stand grumpily at the presentation ceremony as the opposition picks up all the trophies with unintentionally hateful smiles. I am sure the Indian team knows why they are losing. The writing is not just on the wall, it is on sky obliterating billboards. Poor ground fielding, poor footwork while batting, poor bowling when batsmen are set, poor body language, poor captaincy… the woeful litany is long. These men who have played so many Test matches, one-dayers and first-class fixtures surely know the solutions. But they just can’t correct them. That’s the way it is. We can’t and won’t change is the message. Albert Einstein once said it’s madness to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. It’s like a woodpecker trying to drill through a slab of granite by going tock-tock-tock on it. It can’t work. It won’t work.

I wonder if the time is ripe to take some drastic decisions. I wonder what would Louis Gerstner, the great CEO who turned around IBM from a loss-making moribund behemoth to a nifty, agile and highly competitive company would do in this situation? (He wrote a fascinating account of it in his book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”) What would someone like him – a man who isn’t enamored by records and reputations, perhaps doesn’t even have any background in cricket and is obsessed about ruthless short-term turnaround with long term- implications – do? I wonder if he would tell VVS Laxman that he has been a great servant of the team, but the time has come for him to say his goodbyes. Maybe he could tell Sehwag that he cannot open the batting anymore because of his repeated failures that exposes the middle order. Perhaps he would bat Sehwag at No 6. Maybe ask him to shepherd the tail with his explosive batting. He might ask the most solid looking batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, to bat at No 3 because neither is Dravid able to take control of the innings by scoring briskly, nor is he able to stick around for long. Gerstner might tell Tendulkar that it is important for him to leave the secure confines of No 4 and take up the currently vulnerable No 3 slot. Maybe, he would ask Ravichandran Ashwin to open the batting, because he looks like someone who knows where his off stump is.

If someone told him it sounds a bit radical, he could say, “Heck, how many times we are going to have 30 for two situation and hope to win? And what results have your conventional methods got apart from embarrassing defeats?”

And I wonder if he might tell the Indian team that if their heads and shoulders drop when a partnership develops, or if they refuse to attack the ball when they field, they would lose their IPL contracts. Plain and simple.

There is a legendary story of how Suryaji, one of the commanders of great Maratha warrior Shivaji, won the battle of fort Sinhagad. Outnumbered one to five, and demoralised by the death of his brother and the mighty warrior Tanaji, the soldiers were on the verge of running away from the battle. What Suryaji did was simple. He just cut the ropes with which the soldiers could grapple down the fort and beat a cowardly retreat. The only option the soldiers had was – Maaro ya maro. (Kill or get killed). Maybe Gerstner would do something similar.

The need of the hour for Team India is to find a Suryaji. But if history is anything to go by, that’s expecting too much.

(Rohit Gore is the author of Focus, Sam and the recently-released A Darker Dawn. He loves sports, specifically discussing & watching, since his playing days are long gone. His greatest passion for reading has inspired him to write. He has a keen interest in history, especially the history of music and arts. You can know more about him on his website or by following him on Twitter and Facebook )