Explosive revelations

Playing It My Way, the autobiography by Sachin Tendulkar, is certain to top the best sellers charts the moment it hits the stands. For one, it is penned by India’s biggest sports icon and, more importantly, the publishers have done a damn good pre-launch marketing job with the excerpts. For a nation that laps up everything that revolves around the God, the book is seemingly a ‘tell-all’ story by a man whose integrity and humility remain impeccable. Today, as the world wakes up to his version of the country’s darkest cricketing chapter, there is a surrealistic touché of irony given that the protagonists are all living legends, whose achievements remain insurmountable. Tendulkar has not just opened a Pandora’s Box but added salt to the wounds that have long been soothed. Ricky Ponting, Shoaib Akhtar and Kevin Pietersen did likewise recently and laughed all the way to the bank with their unequivocal recounting of the ‘turn of events.’

There is no room for doubt that Greg Chappell (the finest Australian batsman since Sir Don) enjoys the dubious distinction of being India’s enemy No 1, at least in the eyes of every cricket fan. His three-year stint as the coach of Team India was laced with controversies. His running battles with Ganguly, the overwhelming perception that his dictatorial approach made life of every player miserable and destroyed the Indian cricket were contributory factors for his inglorious exit. Far from being a motivator or mentor, his failures at man-management fit into the generally presumed belief that champions make for poor coaches. Taken as a human fallibility, they boil down to bloated egos among players whose talent has been extraordinarily superlative, particularly those of Tendulkar, Chappell and Rahul Dravid, about whose captaincy and the ‘observations’ made vis-à-vis a closed door rendezvous between Chappell and Tendulkar that have sparked the latest din. The Australian ‘ringmaster’, who drew global condemnation for asking Trevor to bowl under-arm, has rubbished the accusations, but questions do remain. Why would any sane person ask Tendulkar to take over the reins when his track-record as a team leader ranks amongst the worst in the game’s history? A feeling of devastated helplessness and the resultant urge to quit the game is something about which the maestro himself has admitted. Moreover, why did he not discuss the issue with Ganguly or Dravid? These may never be answered to justifiable satisfaction because the winner in Tendulkar can ‘never err’ and every Indian will believe him, particularly if the man at the other end is a pariah and Indian cricket’s favourite punching bag. Unlike in the good old days when autobiographies were written for the sake of it, today explosive revelations (fictional or otherwise) are the order of the day, irrespective of the author’s reputation. It is to what levels one takes the ‘truth of the matter’ at face-value that remains paramount.