The statement by Mithali Raj on how she was humiliated by the coach and tour selectors during the Women’s WT20 in the West Indies is turning out to be a peg for a crime thriller. There is anticipation, excitement, revelation and disquiet in what Mithali said in her lengthy e-mail, which itself has become a subject of probe for the Indian board.
The twitterati added spice using colourfully abusive language of the political trolls. Their target was poor coach Ramesh Powar and Diana Edulji, the woman in the two-member Committee of Administrators (CoA), herself a former international. Both have been painted as devious and conniving in the unfolding drama.
Mithali’s statement is almost similar to the one issued by Sachin Tendulkar to see the back of coach Greg Chappell a decade ago. Tendulkar had said: “Things have gone too far to keep quiet. I’ve given my heart and soul to Indian cricket for 17 years and no coach has mentioned that my attitude was not correct, cricket has been my life and always will be….”
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Lakhs of fans responded calling for a probe. Juxtapose Tendulkar’s statement with Mithali’s equally expounding and hard-hitting attack on the coach, getting a similar reaction from the fans. It reads like a mindboggling account of skullduggery. The operative part of her 2,000-odd-word outpouring of anguish and anger.
Mithali says she smelt a conspiracy from the moment the team landed in Antigua and when Powar took five girls for special nets but turned down her request for joining the group. Worse, she alleges, Powar started avoiding her at the ground and walked away from the nets when she was batting. As if to confirm her suspicion, next day she was paired up with a lower-order bat, Deepti Sharma, and they were the second last pair to have a knock. Surely, your top-order batswoman wouldn’t be batting so late, part-time bowlers bowling to her.
Powar can explain himself, but what made the episode more unpleasant was Diana needlessly getting involved by going public with her views. She should have been guarded, more so when she is supposed to be sitting in judgement on the unsavoury happenings as part of the CoA, least of all in matters of team selection.
The key question is whether the coach, selector or the selector on hand tried to reach out to Mithali. Captain Harmanpreet Kaur can’t get away saying “whatever we decided we decided for the team and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t”, or saying she has no regrets over the decision.
Cricket is replete with stories of big bust-ups between egotistical stars and the Harmanpreet-Mithali scrap can have far-reaching repercussions. Superstars in a team have had problems, particularly when one of them happened to be captain, and some of them in turn had major issues with the coaches, in some cases there is no choice but to get rid of the dispensable one.
In India, these personal battles trace back to the times of Col CK Nayudu. Until Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi took over as captain and drilled into the players’ minds that they are not representing their states but the country as a whole, the dressing room was not one of congeniality.
Mithali, who is captain of the ODI team, and Harmanpreet should have thought of their future playing under the other. It’s time they showed the same bonhomie they demonstrated on television channels after the 2017 World Cup. Will they?
(The writer is a veteran commentator and the views expressed are personal. He can be reached at sveturi@gmail.com)