Captaining a cricket team: Tricky with a hint of hypocrisy

Captains’ headache!

Captaining a cricket team is a tricky business. There are no guarantees, except maybe the fact that you will end up with a good many grey hairs sooner than you expected. While making decisions you have to be as careful as a giraffe jumping over sleeping alligators on the Nile, there is a fine line between brilliant and brainless, daring and desperate, inspired and plain idiotic. But the real clincher is this; your decisions aren’t judged on the soundness of the decision itself, but on the outcome.

It isn’t the means employed, but the end itself that matters. The same decision can be lauded as a brilliant piece of innovation and be condemned as a desperate clutching of straws.

The first bit of captaincy I’d like to discuss was by that prince among paupers, Michael Clarke. Actually, this took place before the retirements of Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey so he did have a couple of kings with him as well.

The first Test of Australia’s tour of the West Indies was played at the Kensington Oval, Bridgetown, Barbados. Australia trailed West Indies by 43 runs in the first innings, with Ryan Harris and Nathan Lyon batting steadily on 68 and 40 respectively.

Instead of overhauling the West Indies first innings total, Michael Clarke declared. It did not matter that they trailed by 43, all that mattered was making something happen. Instead of letting the match meander on at its own pace, Clarke decided to take matters into his own hands.

Yes, it was a risk, but it wasn’t a desperate throw of the dice. In a match in which the run rate had not inched above 3 runs an over, this was a declaration of intent. They say you make your own luck, he did just that. West Indies lost 5 wickets that day itself and were bowled out for 148. The message was very clear, we’re coming to get you, you can’t run and you can’t hide. They ended up winning by 3 wickets on the fifth day, completing a tricky chase.

The numbers say that the West Indies had an advantage with a handy but unspectacular first innings lead, but Australia held the psychological advantage. Strange as it may seem, they held that fabled and mythical quality that all sportsmen speak of, momentum.

It was their call; the West Indies did not bowl them out. Their best chance of getting ahead in the match and ultimately winning it lay in bowling and nipping out some early wickets, not in batting on and taking time out of the game. They were the calling the shots, go ahead punk, make my day.

Clarke was criticized when he made basically the same decision on Australia’s disastrous, dysfunctional and at times derisive tour of India in early 2013. The scene was Hyderabad, the second Test of the series. 1-0 down, he declared Australia’s first innings on 237-9, and was slammed.

India racked up 503 and went on to win by the small matter of an innings and 135 runs, in 3 and a half days. They called his decision stupid, egomaniacal even. Who was he to presume that a mere 237 would be enough?