India vs Sri Lanka: Ravi Shastri talks up his boys

“It is a skill. That’s why I’m here and you are there,” a visibly incensed Ravi Shastri retorted at a journalist. The premise of the question was not provocative. Shastri was asked how does he make the team play fearless cricket. It was typical of Shastri. His predecessors might have dealt with it differently. John Wright would have patiently elaborated. Greg Chappell would have frowned. Gary Kirsten would have summoned science or passed on the microphone to mental trainer Paddy Upton. Duncan Fletcher, if at all he confronts the press, would have soberly said, “next question please”. Anil Kumble would have burst into a brief lecture. But Shastri, being Shastri, doesn’t spare such opportunities. The answer rolls out of his tongue and hits you like his cliched, “tracer bullet”. It’s an image that he has carefully nurtured, that of a brazen and blusterous coach, much in the mould of European football managers. Ironically enough, to a later question, conveying the same thing but differently worded, he gave the specifics about his role, or rather what he thinks about his role. “At times you might need to just fine-tune them a bit because the amount of cricket that’s being played you might just get into the odd bad habit without you realising it. That’s where the experience of having played, probably having watched you can pick it up and pass on the message,” he said. Such contractions are inevitable with Shastri. Memorable jibes Likewise, he enlivens the usually mundane pre-match press conference, leaving behind a string of memorable claims, boasts and jibes. For example, a day before the series opener between India and South Africa in 2015, he was asked whether India would pick three spinners on a perceivably spinning surface. “Why just three? We might pick four. Who said you can’t play four?” he responded. You can feel his hard, flat, insolent gaze glaring out between these words. You can also appreciate his spontaneity. Later, the word “overbearing” too was slipped into the midst. The exact question was “how do you not become overbearing in the dressing room?” Clearly, he would have sensed the corollary. It was the word Kohli allegedly levelled at Kumble. “When you have been around the game for 37 years you probably learnt a little bit. So that experience is very handy for me in knowing exactly how to deal with the players,” he boomed, overbearingly. Shastri sometimes can’t resist hyperboles and he loses historical perspective. Like when he said, “A lot of big names came to Sri Lanka several times in the last 20 years and they never won a Test series. But they (Virat Kohli’s team) have done that.” While saying this, he clenches his fists and almost jumps twice off his seat. He is, factually, correct. Kohli could manage what four Indian skippers-Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble and MS Dhoni-couldn’t in their expeditions across the Palk Strait. A creditable achievement, no doubt. He is also justified in saying that those teams had some of the biggest names in world cricket, and Kohli’s was a youngish squad. But what he also didn’t factor in was that India’s golden generation coincided with Sri Lanka’s as well. In that span, Sri Lanka were near invincible, had lost only three Test series at home. The Sri Lanka that Kohli beat, with all due credit to him, was just marginally weaker to the current Sri Lankan team. This historical inference only contradicts Shastri’s own favourite line that “this team doesn’t bother about what has happened in the past or the history books.” Contrast it with Kumble’s reaction after India beat the West Indies 2-0 at home. “It’s obviously India’s biggest win here, but we should also not forget this was one of more ordinary sides we had played here. Back in our days, it was a really difficult place to tour. But they are not what they used to be, and we will be up against more difficult teams in the future,” he had said after India’s series win in St Lucia. It was as Kumble-like, as it was not Shastri-like. Plain and placid, without the loudness of the latter. In such formal spaces, Kumble seldom uttered anything that’s remotely provocative. Perhaps the only time he uttered anything that made headlines was after the infamous Sydney Test. Even there, he was minimalistic, though, sharp in his choice of words. “Only one team was playing in the spirit of the game, that’s all I can say,” he said after the Test. There was another false attribution to Kohli’s team. “This team won an ODI series here, which no team has in the last 20 years.” In fact, Kohli hasn’t yet captained a limited-overs side in Sri Lanka. Perhaps the most cryptic line was this, “This team is used to doing things that a lot of other teams haven’t done, and that too overseas.” Perhaps, what he meant was that the team will achieve overseas what their predecessors haven’t. For Kohli, as captain, has played just two Test series abroad before this. Then, this is part of what makes Shastri entertaining as well as frivolous. It only adds to the Shastri-ness of it that as soon as the intense session winded up, he burst into a jig with Sri Lanka’s famous cheerleader Percy Abeyesekara.