India’s ongoing tour of the West Indies has a holiday feeling about it.
One match has already been washed out. The other one saw a comfortable, facile victory for India where West Indies hardly competed. After a high-voltage and intense Champions Trophy, this has almost seemed like a vacation for Virat Kohli and his bunch.
On Tuesday, the team took advantage of a rare off day in Antigua to have some fun. The team headed off to a beach, to engage in some volley and even go jet-skiing.
A report in the Indian Express said that a few players indulged in beach volleyball and other water sports, while others preferred to soak in the sights and sounds around them. And what the captain said was also significant.
“It is a good opportunity to have a day off and do something together as a team and enjoy whatever we have on hand,” said Kohli to Express. “It’s important to grab these opportunities and stick together. Guys training together, sticking together, trying to find things to do together, I think it really helps to bond and it really helps you understand each other much better and I think that is a very important aspect of any team.”
At any other time, you could probably dismiss this as pure PR fluff. But coming after a fractious period in Indian cricket, it is important.
Indian cricket has not been a stranger to divided dressing rooms. Shadowy rumours of camps and rifts within have been part and parcel of almost every Indian team which has put on the blues. And there was fertile ground again when there was news of a rift between Kohli and previous coach Anil Kumble.
Kohli has clearly stated that he did whatever he did with the team’s best interests in mind. But such a public rift must have surely affected the players.
Captaincy is not easy, more so in cricket. In his seminal book The Art of Captaincy, England’s Mike Brearley pointed out the challenges involved. “A captain has from time to time to be prepared to take an unpopular line. He must have a measure of indepedence. He cannot always be ‘one of the boys’,” he wrote. “He will have to criticise individuals or even the whole group, and say things, or insist on activities, that they do not like. He will have to be able to drop senior players from the team, and give them the news. He must be prepared to recommend that some members of a staff be sacked”.
Kohli has lived up to one end of the bargain and now it is time for the team to live up to theirs. And this is where this West Indies tour is so important. In India, they would have been plagued and harangued everywhere, never being even allowed to put it behind and get past it. But in beautiful Antigua, the team is bonding and enjoying each other’s company, putting the past behind them. And that is, perhaps, much more important than any meaningless One-Day International series.
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