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Time for Kohli to replace Dhoni as India captain: Gavaskar

Nagpur: Batting legend Sunil Gavaskar feels young Virat Kohli is the future of Indian cricket and he is ready to take up the captaincy job from incumbent Mahendra Singh Dhoni in the aftermath of the series defeat against England.

England broke the 28-year-old wait by defeating India 2-1 verdict in the Test series after the fourth and final match ended in a draw here on Monday.

Gavaskar said it is time the selectors look to the future as Dhoni seemed out of sorts in this series.

“Till the fourth day of this Test I said there is no alternative to Mahendra Singh Dhoni, but now that Virat (Kohli) has come up with a 100 under trying circumstances I think he has discovered a good part about himself. I think he is ready to take on the mantle,” the former India skipper said.

“I think this is something to be looked at in a positive manner because that’s where the future is,” Gavaskar told NDTV.

He also criticised the Indian team for the humiliating defeat but Dhoni’s name came up for special mention for his ordinary and unaggressive captaincy in this series.

“If India were looking for a win they should have shown the intent by declaring at the overnight score. England batted exceedingly well but our bowlers were ineffective and our batters didn’t do as much as they were expected to do. It was a team failure,” he said.

“You don’t put a forward short-leg and a silly point to just get wickets. You also put them to pressurise the batsmen and get his wicket somewhere else. When you crowd a batsmen with fielders in his peripheral vision pressure automatically come on him and that’s what he (Dhoni) didn’t do,” Gavaskar said about Dhoni’s reluctance to deploy a more attacking field during England’s second innings.

“I don’t think England necessarily played better than us but they were more determined. They didn’t lose heart after the defeat in the first Test in Ahmedabad and instead put in extra effort,” he observed.

A tale of 3 home defeats

In the late 1990s, Indian cricket was in a mess. There was the match-fixing scandal. Captain M Azharuddin’s captaincy had come to an end and he was replaced by the great Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin himself failed as captain. 1983 World Cup winning captain Kapil Dev failed as a coach.

There was gloom all around.

But through it all, we had one thing solidly with us: Our record in home Tests. The last we lost was to Pakistan in 1987. Since then we were virtually invincible at home.

Then in 1999, we lost to Pakistan in Kolkata in the Asian Test Championship. While that couldn’t be called exactly a home defeat, since the matches were played all across the sub-continent, it was a warning all the same.

That defeat happened despite India knocking down Pakistan for 185 runs in the first innings of the match thanks to a 5-wicket haul by J Srinath. India couldn’t even make it to the finals of that tournament.

But in the very next year in 2000, South Africa thrashed us 2-0 at home. India failed to cross 250 in any of the four innings it played. Our spinners failed to contain the South African team. 

No South African batsman hit a century in the series, but thanks to a pure team effort on the part of the Opposition, the runs kept coming. We crashed to an innings defeat in the second Test, so hopeless were our batsmen.

But that was just the wake-up call that the BCCI needed.

John Wright was brought in as coach. He went on to professionalise the whole cricketing system in India, a process that yielded rich dividends for many years. Sourav Ganguly was made captain and brought aggression and a sense of belief into the Indian team. 

We started winning abroad in Tests, there was the famous 2-1 victory over world champions Australia in 2001; we won the ICC Champions Trophy and peaked by reaching the 2003 World Cup final.

But it was all downhill after that. Ganguly rested on his laurels and started declining as a captain and India started declining as a team.

In late 2004 amidst all that, Australia beat us 2-1 in Tests. Ganguly led us in the first two Tests and it is alleged that he backed out of the third Test at Nagpur after he saw the greenness of the pitch.

That home defeat was the beginning of the end for Ganguly. Greg Chappell was brought in as coach and he tried to treat Indian cricket with his own brand of shock therapy. Ganguly was finally dethroned as captain and the Dravid-Chappell duo did see some success as we recorded 17 straight successful chases in ODIs.

We also won Test series on West Indies and England soil after ages.

The ODI 2007 WC defeat led to another shake-up and after that captain MS Dhoni and coach Gary Kirsten ushered in Indian cricket’s greatest age ever.

But after the ODI WC victory in 2011, Indian cricket entered another dark age. 

We got thrashed 0-4 in England and the BCCI did absolutely nothing.

We got thrashed 0-4 in Australia and the BCCI did absolutely nothing again.

Greats Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman announced their retirements on their own.

For the BCCI it was business as usual and there were also some statements in the press that now things would automatically become alright since we were playing mostly home Tests from now on. 

We beat the weak teams of West Indies and New Zealand 2-0 each giving us a further sense of false security.

At the beginning of the England tour, many started talking of 4-0 and there were also cheeky ads on TV.

But India had been playing shabby cricket for too long and its greats had been failing for too long for us to take advantage of the situation. 

So now India faces its third home Test series defeat in 12 years.

The first two defeats eventually led to a shake-up in the cricketing establishment.

So the question to be asked is whether there will be a shake-up this time too, or will the BCCI continue to bury its head in the sand like an ostrich?

Tendulkar is not enjoying cricket, says Gavaskar

Nagpur: Legendary former cricketer Sunil Gavaskar said that it is time Sachin Tendulkar should make a decision on his career as he felt the senior batsman was no longer enjoying his time on the field.

“The important thing is how much you are enjoying the game. If you are not enjoying the game, enjoying to be on the field and doing things other than your speciality I feel that’s the time to move on. May be that’s happening to him (Tendulkar) and may be he will know that the time is right to go,” Gavaskar told NDTV.

“Quite clearly this series wasn’t good for him. In this Test he looked just a bit lost in (England’s) second innings, at least that is what I have gathered from his body language.''

''May be that’s the sign.''

“As he said I think he will reassess his future before the Australia series,” he added.

The former opener said complacency also had a big role to play in India’s embarrassing defeat.

“Complacency is a part of Indian psyche and you can’t do much about it. Every time an Indian tries to be ambitious he is pulled down and that’s one of the reason why Indians don’t have the killer mentality,” Gavaskar observed.

“Having won the first Test in Ahmedabad that complacency factor came in. I don’t think India wanted to win (the series) as badly as England wanted. I didn’t look helpless out here, they looked capable but the instinct was missing,” Gavaskar added.