8 cricket captains who share traits with football managers
What the manager is in football, the captain is in cricket. Managers in their long overcoats, with their crazy touchline antics and bullying post-match press conferences, are paradoxical figures of much reverence and ridicule in modern football. Every tactic of theirs is put under the knife and analysed by fans and pundits during and after the game.If managers are the favourite whipping boys of modern football, it is the captain in cricket who is held accountable and admired or abused for every decision of his. The coach remains a peripheral figure often absent from the public eye in cricket and it is the captain who must make the decisions that matter in the field of play.For this article, we have chosen to compare great football managers with legendary cricket captains based on a variety of factors like physique, demeanour, tactics and success. Let us look at 8 cricket captains who share traits with football managers.
#8 Diego Maradona - Sachin Tendulkar (Legendary player, unsuccessful captain)
Diego Maradona and Sachin Tendulkar are legends in their own right who have reached the pinnacle thanks to their superhuman skill and prowess. But there is an obvious point of unhappy similarity between them -- despite their legendary status, both Maradona and Tendulkar have shown that they clearly lack man-management skills.
Tendulkar's short stints of captaincy were as disastrous as Maradona's tenure as head coach of the clubs and the country. Maradona had worked as a coach alongside Carlos Fren to lead Mandiyú of Corrientes (1994) and Racing Club (1995) but did not taste enough success. He was then appointed as the manager of Al Wasl FC, a Dubai-based club, in May 2011 only to be sacked in July 2012.
But his reign as the head coach of Argentina prior to this was more boisterous and ignominious to say the least. Maradona took over the reins of the Albicelestes in November 2008. He saw his team succumb to a 6-1 defeat to Bolivia, their worst ever defeat margin, leaving Argentina's hopes of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup in serious jeopardy.
Argentina eventually did qualify after which Maradona courted controversy asking reporters to "S**k it and keep on s**king it' in a live post-match press conference. Argentina were comprehensively beaten 4-0 by Germany in the quarter-finals of the World Cup after which Maradona was sacked.
Similarly, Tendulkar never prospered as a captain and the burden of captaincy very often hindered him from playing freely. His most embarrassing moment as a captain came during the 1997 Test series when India collapsed for an unthinkable 81 while chasing a low target of 120 for victory.
Having been sacked ignominiously, he was re-appointed as the captain in 1999. His second stint was unimpressive as well and he recommended Ganguly's name for captaincy as he stepped down in 2000.
In his autobiography Playing it My Way, Tendulkar writes that he witnessed some of his darkest days during his captaincy and stopped enjoying his cricket. He also emphasizes on the fact that the selectors did not always give him the team he had wanted.
Interestingly, years later, he would step down from the Mumbai Indians captaincy after which the franchise went on to win both the IPL and Champions League T20 under the captaincy of Rohit Sharma.