Of coaches and administrators

So Greg Chappell is India's new cricket coach. What I found most amazing in the weeks leading up to selection day, was that there were murmurings from various quarters about a foreign coach not being able to understand Indian culture and adjust to our social milieu ... particularly strange I'd say after an overseas man has just completed his term as one of India's most successful coaches! Even more shocking was that a lot of these misplaced ramblings were coming from the lone Indian in the race for coach, Jimmy Amarnath. Surely he could've found a more appealing USP than the swadeshi card! At the end of the day though, one would have to say the right choice has been made. Chappell not only brings with him a rare depth of cricketing knowledge and acumen, he also appears to be a shrewd, no-nonsense task master who will give his best and expect the same from everyone else. He might just turn out to be the right man at the right time for a team desperately needing a new way of looking at things. It's also encouraging that the BCCI has signed him up for two entire years (thankfully discarding their dreadful series-to-series contract system) and he has been given the option of selecting his own support staff. We must, however, guard against setting sky-high expectations right from the outset, as is usually our wont. It would be unfair to expect Chappell to brandish some sort of magic wand and reverse the fortunes of Indian cricket. Efforts at a turn-around will have to be multi-pronged -- the players, selectors and administrators will have to contribute just as much as a coach. Harsha Bhogle had a very pertinent point in a recent column of his, when he said that the best teams in world cricket need not be the best coached, but are almost always the best administered. Cricket Australia and England Cricket Board, please take a bow. BCCI ... well ... umm ... err ... And the same holds true for the rest of Indian sport. Every sports body in the country is run like the personal fiefdom of some politician or industrialist or worse a fatal combination of the two. Ronojoy Sen's article in yesterday's Times of India sums up this gloomy state of affairs pretty accurately. The truth quite frankly is that unless we completely overhaul the way we look at running sport in our country, we cannot hope to produce achievers at the international level. The best players and the best coach can only be step two and three in the process. We seem to have forgotten step one.