The Saffron Candidate

Gideon Haigh on India's new coach

Artwork by Fisher Classics

Gautam Gambhir has successfully completed his first, brief assignment as coach of India, and suitable cliches are being slotted into place.  He is excitable; he is intense; he is emotional. We are reading of his great bond with the likes of SKY , Ravi Bishnoi and Shubman Gill; his first session with the players was the subject of a slow-motion Instagram reel lacking only an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.  

Pretty much as you’d expect from India’s largely cowed and captive media, but the rest of the world has been surprisingly incurious about an appointment so significant.  As coach of the Indian cricket team, Gambhir is in a role far more important than Gareth Southgate's was, and his florid patriotic avowals suggest he knows it.  ‘India is my identity and serving my country has been the greatest privilege of my life’: not ‘representing’, you’ll notice, but the martial formulation of ‘serving’.  A cynic might recall Mencken’s nostrum: ‘Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.’

So what does the appointment signify?  Gambhir was a fine Test player.  He might be remembered as a great but for the surrounding constellation of Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman and Ganguly, and his mediocre record in Australia and England .  You get the feeling, in fact, that the job of Indian coach has so grown in magnitude it will henceforward be the preserve of significant national names - they are the only names that can be sold to the public.  There’ll be no more John Wrights or Duncan Fletchers.  Greg Chappells? Forgeddaboutit.  The rumours connecting Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting remained that.  I doubt that the chain now formed of Kumble, Shastri, Dravid and Gambhir will tolerate foreign impurities.

Gambhir’s playing record was also accorded a heavier weighting than his coaching credentials.  He has done little coaching per se at either of the IPL franchises he has been involved in, Lucknow Super Giants or Kolkata Knight Riders.  Much has been made of KKR’s success in the recent IPL.  But the franchise was coached by Chandu Pandit, formerly coach of Mumbai and Vidarbha, whom precisely nobody mentioned in connection with the Indian coaching job because he played only five Tests.  At KKR, as at Lucknow, Gambhir filled that mysterious position of ‘mentor’, akin to the angel on a Christmas tree - you’re never quite clear on why it’s there, but the structure feels incomplete without one.  Although Nagraj has done a useful survey here, the man himself has offered no identifiable pedagogical philosophy beyond: 'My learning has been simple - it has been all about winning’.

Yet almost certainly nothing mattered more than Gambhir’s political connections.  Gambhir was a protege of India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley, who ushered him into the Lok Sahba for a career characterised by sycophancy, prickliness, indiscipline and non-achievement.

The BCCI job has really been Gambhir’s for the asking since he begged leave to ‘focus on my upcoming cricket commitments’.  A selection process was bodgied up but Gambhir appears to have been the only applicant , Laxman standing obediently to one side.  That’s largely because it was common knowledge that Gambhir was the pick of the House of Shah, which he openly courted and now lauds to the skies.

This need not matter so much, or at least any more than, as Sanjay Manjrekar notes, the coach really does these days: India is blessed with such an abundance of talent and resources that the proverbial drover’s dog could probably do a half-decent job.  But the further saffronisation of India’s cricket team, the succession of a calm-browed, apolitical Rahul Dravid by a volatile courtier of the junta has numerous entailments.  How the new structure surrounds its first stress tests will hold those cliches up to the light.  Expectations of India will be high in Australia this summer.  Who will take the blame should Rohit Sharma’s team fall short?