With the appointment of Gautam Gambhir, Team India will be moving on from the retirement of coach Rahul Dravid. The role will devolve upon Gambhir with an even greater load of expectations now that the team had broken years-long jinxes to win the T20 World Cup in the US and the Caribbean.
The role of the coach in Team India is to be seen in a different context and not from the viewpoint that a coach is something teams drive to the cricket ground in. There is no doubt that man managers and their retinue of support staff are playing an increasingly bigger role in how sports teams perform. Young Indian cricketers need all the help in grooming that they can get and Gambhir is not a bad choice when viewed in this perspective.
It is true that Gambhir, a politician and an MP till not so long ago, is known to be of a certain temperament that is not always about winning over cricketers and influencing men of the administration. He has been known to carry some baggage, including from the ODI World Cup triumph of 2011 of Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team for which he believed enough credit didn’t trickle down to him as top scorer in the chase.
Gambhir may even have picked up differences of opinion with Virat Kohli who has a valid claim to be one of the world’s leading batsmen across formats in contemporary cricket. The national task that he has been given now will, however, give Gambhir sufficient scope to build on the man management successes he has enjoyed with Kolkata Knight Riders as player and mentor.
Negotiations are still on as to who would be the key members of his support staff, but it is only logical that he be given leeway in these appointments so he can begin the task of sustaining the national team that is top-ranked in all formats and has a newly minted ICC Cup in its cupboard now.
Gambhir may draw from the examples that Ravi Shastri and Rahul Dravid set in the way they performed during their tenure, making harmony, unity and the feeling that Team India are one big family revelling in each other’s successes the keys to sustained performance.
The new coach has taken the job when it appears that the sky’s the limit for Team India which, however, is yet to win the World Test championship to complete cricket’s triple of grand world titles.
