Question: Why is the Indian cricket team like Robert Oppenheimer?
Answer: Because both are experimenting all the time!
But, while Oppenheimer ends up successfully testing a nuclear device, our cricketers end up with a succession of damp squibs. But don’t lose heart. This is what experimenting is all about. You try, try and try again. Really, our cricketers can be very trying.
The batters you have chosen will fail you once, your bowlers will fail you the next time, and third time around both batters and bowlers will flop. That is the cue for the captain of the ODI side Hardik Pandya to rise to the occasion and rally the side with heartening words: “Sometimes losing is good,” he said, echoing Surf Excel’s famous - daag achha hai line, “it teaches you a lot of things.”
So, what have our losses taught us? It has taught us that the gentleman cricketer Rahul Dravid can conjure the most gentlemanly excuses for every kind of calamity. When we lose a match early in the series, ‘our boys are still rusty’. When we lose at the end, ‘the fellows are jaded’. When we lose in the middle of the series, we are – you have guessed it – experimenting.
There is no dearth of talent in our land. We all know how everyone shines at the IPLs year after year. If anything, we have an excess. Sometimes we have three alternatives for every player selected, and enough wicketkeepers for our ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams. So, what does the team management do? They select separate teams for T20, ODI and Test. That way more of our players get a chance to lose. They also start experimenting. Should we shift the openers into the muddle – sorry, middle order? If a spinner has done exceptionally well, shall we bowl a googly by dropping him in the next match? When a player gets erratic, will it improve his strike-rate if we make him vice-captain?
To confound matters, many players sport similar names. I am sure members of the think-tank must be tearing their hair – Chahar or Chahal, Pande or Pandya. You could also discover to your mortification that the Yadav you have chosen specifically to add strength and spectacle to the batting line-up turns out to be the left arm unorthodox spinner Kuldeep Yadav.
Back in the 1970s, there used to be a kind of films called ‘experimental cinema’. These films were feted on the film circuit and greatly respected. Inevitably they would win half a dozen awards at film festivals and run for half a dozen days at the theatres. Nobody said that the experiments had failed. Neither do our crickets managers.
Instead, they follow Thomas Edison’s example. When his labours in the lab misfired time and time again, the scientist said that he had discovered 999 ways of not making the electric bulb. We, on our part, are finding out 100 ways of not putting together a winning cricket team.
Howzatt for experimenting!
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.