How India Can Win the World Cup
 |
|
Image: Amit Verma
|
|
PLAYERS & MENTORS (l to r)Akash Chopra, captain Hrishikesh Kanitkar and Pankaj Singh led the assault from the front
|
t was 3.30 p.m. on Janurary 15, 2011. Baroda, set a target of 375 runs in 29 overs, had just lost their fourth wicket on 24. It was clear that their target, already Mount Improbable, was now in the realm of the impossible. The captains shook hands. Baroda had conceded. And Rajasthan won their first Ranji trophy.
The last time Rajasthan had reached a Ranji final was in 1973-74. Never before had a team from the Plate (or the junior) division of Ranji won the title. And barely a year ago, in 2009-10, Rajasthan had ranked last even in this category.
Sharda Ugra, senior editor at Cricinfo, says quality administration is what is common to all the better performing teams and many teams languishing in the Plate division could learn a lot from Rajasthan’s turnaround. “In the 1990s, Punjab came up in a big way, primarily because they improved the administration of the game,” says Ugra.
Champion by a Mile
Not only did Rajasthan finish as Ranji champions, they wiped the floor with their opposition. The team remained unbeaten in the season and not once did they concede the first innings lead. They scored the highest team total — 641 for 7 declared — in the tournament. In four of the season’s nine matches, they scored more than 500 and twice missed the mark by about 10 runs. In the last 10 years, Rajasthan had crossed 500 in an innings just once.
Two of the lowest batting totals in this Ranji championship were against Rajasthan. Their bowlers Pankaj Singh and Deepak Chahar took 43 and 40 wickets respectively to become two of the top three wicket takers in the competition.
This does not sound like Rajasthan. It’s more like Steve Waugh’s marauders! How did a bunch of losers end up doing the victory lap?
Every journey begins with a first step. Rajasthan’s first step was Sanjay Dixit being elected president of Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) in 2009. A 1986 batch IAS officer, Dixit climbed the ranks of Rajasthan’s cricket administration to eventually challenge and defeat Lalit Modi, the disgraced Indian Premier League czar.
Dixit loves cricket. He grew up in Lucknow and would have perhaps played professionally had he not excelled in academics. “In India, we don’t let the brightest students take up sports,” he says. Dixit studied marine engineering and worked for four years in the merchant navy before taking the civil service examinations and joining the Rajasthan cadre.
He says the only time he did not play was for the four years he spent sailing. Once on shore, he went back to troubling batsmen with his special variety of fast leg spin.
By 1991, he had led the Rajasthan government secretariat to win all the possible championships. In 1994, he was chosen president of the Barmer Cricket Association while he was posted there as district magistrate. By the time he became the head of RCA in 2009, he knew what ailed Rajasthan cricket.
The Ailments
Part of the problem was politics. The RCA was often jocularly called the Rungta Cricket Association, since one family had a stranglehold over it. Then Modi took over in 2005. While infrastructure was built to establish a state-of-the-art RCA Academy, little was done to improve the quality of cricket in the state.
Cricketers and administrators were seen to belong to one camp or another. The factionalism and apathy affected every aspect of the game, including team selections. In 2009, there were two sets of teams claiming they represented Rajasthan.
Image: Amit Verma
GOOD SHEPHERD Sanjay Dixit, the man who led the change
This led to some perverse practices. Since the RCA did not even supply balls for local and state matches, local teams would use the worst possible ball because such a ball would soften quickly and become more difficult to hit. The same players suffered heavily when they played outside the state where the much harder Kookaburra ball was used.
In December 2009, Dixit got his second chance to lead RCA. He had been elected RCA president in March 2009, but by September Modi had gathered enough momentum to stall proceedings. In countering Modi, Dixit got support from C.P. Joshi, the then Union minister for rural development.
In the December RCA elections, Joshi ran against Modi for the post of president, while Dixit ran for honorary secretary. This Joshi-Dixit combine defeated Modi.
However, the 2009-10 Ranji season was coming to a close and the damage had been done. Rajasthan not only stayed in the Plate division of Ranji, it ranked last in it. The under-19 team was relegated to the same division while the under-16 team failed to qualify for the national championship.
“The ultimate test of cricket associations is how their teams perform. RCA was a complete failure,” says Dixit.
To get everybody to see beyond their factions, he had to be like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. He brought in sweeping changes in the selection panels by appointing only those who had played Ranji cricket for Rajasthan and understood the game well. “Dixit would discuss each selection to ensure only merit was considered and, over time, people forgot which group they belonged to,” says Vinod Mathur, one of the selectors of the junior cricket teams in Rajasthan. Mathur admits he had earlier belonged to the so-called Rungta faction.
Single Page View
