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Pritish Nandy

Great cricketers do not usually make great captains

The Peter Principle applies as much to sports as to anything else. We always tend to promote eminently successful people into absurd levels of incompetence. Where they falter, trip, fail. And make a complete fool of themselves.

I know of some wonderfully gifted reporters who were so good on their jobs that they were promoted into editors. Managing editors, associate editors, executive editors, co-ordinating editors, sports editors, political editors, business editors, news editors, entertainment editors. Whatever. They were instant disasters in their new jobs but, because of the hierarchical nature of the profession, could not backtrack into their old assignments fearing a sense of failure. Some of them quit journalism. Others faded into oblivion.

There are identical examples in the advertising profession. Some of the finest creative people, particularly copywriters, were so successful in their jobs that they were given top management responsibilities by their employers. Or were hired by rival agencies to head their operations. A few may have been successful by sheer accident but most of these extremely talented people lost their creative skills and floundered on the high seas of management accounting and marketing superstrategies. They were no longer copywriters. Nor were they good CEOs.

Talented book editors eventually become third rate publishers. Excellent photographers become pompous photo editors. Great designers are promoted into file shuffling art directors. Fantastic software engineers end up as hustlers and body shoppers. Creative music makers end up as poor impressarios and rotten entrepreneurs trying to sell huge catalogues of trash whereas they could have ensured their place in the annals of history by just producing six great albums.

The reason? Everyone feels he has to push ahead. The queue at the back keeps driving you harder and harder.

Core competency is not always valued, respected. A person who sticks to doing only what he or she is good at is often seen as staling. As a has been, not a happening person. That is why a great painter like Husain prefers to make mediocre films and an outstanding actor like Amitabh Bachchan sidesteps his remarkable career to build a dud company like ABCL which kills his image, ruins his reputation, earns him a dreadfully bad name.

Our selectors and our media have pushed our cricketers to the wall. In exactly the same way.

Mohammed Azharuddin was one of our finest batsmen. He was stylish, reliable, amazingly self confident. Put him under stress and he would bloom. But the Peter Principle is a ruthless leveller. So, for no reason other than the fact that he was such a wonderful player, he was promptly rewarded by those stupid people who decide on who should lead the Indian team. He was named captain. The result was, predictably, a disaster. The Indian team lost one of its finest, most reliable batsmen. Azharuddin lost his peace of mind. To cap it all, we got a rotten captain who led us into absolute ignominy.

The very media that had sung hosannas to Azharuddin then became a lynching mob. They found everything wrong with him. They called him unreliable, whimsical, lacking in leadership qualities. They picked on his personal life, made a martyr of his former wife, sneered at his new girlfriend, questioned his ethics, and (what is worse) even went to the extent of insinuating that he was involved in match fixing and was (for all practical purposes) a traitor to the nation and to the game. The garlands they had once thrust around his neck turned into ugly vipers and kraits. Demands grew from all over that he be sacked, replaced. No one wanted him in the team. So they drove him into the worst patch of his cricketing career.

Young Sachin Tendulkar, barely out of his teens and the star batsman, became the new hero. And, then, the same thing happened to him. By virtue of being the new hero of Indian cricket, he became the star candidate for the top job. The Peter Principle was at work again.

Tendulkar has now gone the same way. Defeated by the same inexorable logic. Doing a job he should not have been given in the first place. Captaincy weighed far too heavily on his batting shoulders and, in any case, it is a stupid idea that every great batsman should mature into a great captain. Captaincy demands an entirely different set of skills. Including strategic thinking and nerves of steel. In fact, ideally, great players should be retained only as great players. They should not be burdened with any other responsibilities.

The captain of the Indian cricket team should be chosen to lead, not play. He should be chosen to think. He ought to be a canny strategist. Above all, he should not be in the team by virtue of his great batting or bowling skills. Even if he is a second rate player, his place on the team should be ensured by his captaincy skills. He should be under no pressure to perform as anything more than a brave, imaginative captain who can take the right amount of risks to win. The dead weight of responsibility should not jeopardise his game. He should be judged by his decisions, not his play.

That is why, even though I am delighted by Azharuddin's return as captain because I always felt that he got an unfair deal from everyone --the selectors, the media, the crowds -- I feel sad that the same mistake is being repeated all over again. We killed two of our finest cricketers, Azharuddin and Tendulkar, and made them ghosts of their former batting selves. Now, instead of leaving them alone and allowing them to rediscover their self confidence, their past form, we are once again making the same mistake. By believing that a great cricketer must make a great captain.

Great cricketers do not usually make great captains. Just as great reporters do not make great editors. Great copywriters do not make great agency heads. Great actors do not make great empire builders. Great salesmen do not often make great CEOs. Even great prophets never graduate into becoming God. It requires a different kind of skill, a different kind of expertise to run this universe.

We must learn to respect talent for what it is. Instead of forcing it up the stupid hierarchical ladder in the name of promotion, upgradation, recognition of talent. You cannot take your chef, even if he is the best in the world, and make him the CEO of your hotel. You cannot take a great violinist and ask him to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The selectors have blundered once again. And poor Azharuddin will find the going as rough as he found it the last time. Because a captain needs to lead, aggregate, hone and direct talent. He needs to take unusual risks, meet unusual challenges. Not fight to keep his place on the team by the sheer merit of his own game.

Pritish Nandy