Greg’s tenure worst of my career
Australian coach’s abrasive behaviour harmed Indian cricket
Greg’s tenure as coach was the worst of my career. There is no doubt we failed as a collective in 2007, but his high-handed manner added to our disappointment and, in the immediate aftermath of defeat, had a harmful impact on Indian cricket. UNWELCOME OPINIONS
The outrage in India after the 2007 World Cup was not helped by armchair experts who were sitting thousands of miles away but still passing judgement on Indian cricket and suggesting I should ‘have a good long look into the mirror’ and think about retiring. Such opinions, which were published in Indian newspapers, provoked fans across the country. I have never quite understood why Ian Chappell, who was merely reporting on the game, should have got a headline in the Indian press. Would any of our former players commenting on Ricky Ponting or Michael Clarke have had a headline in the Melbourne Age or the Sydney Morning Herald? Chappell would have done better to stick to Australian cricket.
I remember meeting Ian Chappell in Durban in 2010 during the CLT20... I bumped into him as I was coming out of a health club after a session in the gym with my physio, Nitin Patel, who was party to the entire exchange. Ian started the conversation by saying that now he knew the secret behind my scoring big runs. I reminded him that he was conveniently changing his stand, considering what he’d written in 2007. I said to him that I had not done what he suggested back then because I was well aware of what I needed to do and how much cricket I had left in me.
I also said that critics like him change with the wind. When the going is good, they write positive things and when the going gets tough, they start making a lot of negative comments without ever trying to find out what actually is going through a player’s body or mind. He then asked me if I had changed the weight of my bat. I told him that I hadn’t changed a thing and was doing exactly what I had been doing for twenty long years. He was the one who had conveniently changed his opinion n because I had been scoring heav- ily between 2008 and 2010.
Finally the conversation moved to Greg. I told Ian bluntly that Greg had not been popular r and I would not want to share a dressing room with him again. . Ian attempted to argue that Greg g had always had a problem trying g to understand failure... I said that that was not my concern and all that mattered to me was that he had failed to take Indian cricket forward. Ian was most surprised to hear all this. In fact, Nitin Patel told me soon after that I was the last person he had expected to lash h out like this.