Showing posts with label virat kohli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virat kohli. Show all posts

Sunday 29 August 2021

Kohli's team needs more players who are NOT like Kohli

Virat Kohli clearly sets the tone for the Indian Cricket Team
He needs more leaders around him, who are NOT like him

Should members of a team be tightly-knit?

Should a team be a band of brothers, so close that they can live each other’s lives, complete each other’s sentences, and even sense each other’s unspoken thoughts? Should they foster this sense of brotherhood by living every waking minute of their lives together, eating the same meals, listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes, sloping their shoulders at the same angle, sporting the same scruffy beards?

This is a Goldilocks problem. Some unity is clearly good. Too much of this good stuff is counter-productive. It creates group think (or more precisely, group feel). The hard part is to get the balance just right.

What we just saw from the Indian cricket team in England is both the good and the bad side of this Goldilocks problem.

In the Lord’s test, it was thrilling to see the passion, commitment, and belief in this Indian team. The energy India created was so thick that I could have cut it with a knife 5,000 miles away. They created this magic by feeding off and amplifying each other’s intensity.

Two weeks later, at Headingley, the same team were flatter than a dosa (or a pancake). They reminded me of Woody Allen’s truism: that eighty percent of success is just showing up. Our boys didn’t show up. Sure, there was technique involved – the optimal Headlingley length is about a yard and a half fuller than a Lord’s length – but this team has enough resources to have learnt and acted on that technical difference. We didn’t learn quickly enough. We weren’t unlucky. We were uninspired.

England feed off each other's energy
At Headingley, day 4

How can a team go from magical to uninspired in one match? When they’re too close to each other. When their moods, thoughts and feelings are too contagious. Or, when their moods, thoughts and feelings are being orchestrated by one individual. When that happens, the team starts to act like a single organism rather than a set of individuals with distinct minds and roles. When that happens a team, in any walk of like, the team's performance see-saws or yo-yos. They lack the resilience and stability a team should have. 

I think that is happening to Virat's Indian team. When a couple of members get inspired, several others lift their game. When a couple of them get into a funk, several others also get into a funk. This team is too united.

In the long sweep of history, this unity is an excellent thing.

My generation of cricket fans remember the long painful years when the Indian cricket team was anything but united. We remember the time of Gavaskar vs. Kapil Dev regional politics, of the East Zone quota (Barun Burman? Pranob Roy?), of the time when Raj Singh Dungarpur appointed Azharuddin captain to clip the wings of players asking for their fair share of the economic value they were creating, and – the lowest point in our history - the way Azharuddin went on to make money in his own way by throwing matches for bookies. After all those horrors, the unity, continuity, ambition and therefore excellence we’ve seen in the age of Ganguly, Dhoni and Kohli has been a delight.

This unity can’t be taken for granted. We need only look around at the West Indies, Sri Lanka or Pakistan to know the cost of disunity. These countries continue to produce talented individuals. They haven’t had a decent team since Brian Lara, Arjuna Ranatunga or Imran Khan because they haven’t found strong leadership and therefore unity. India has been the only third-world/ emerging-market team consistently challenging the traditional superpowers of England and Australia in the twenty-first century, because we’ve consistently found leadership and unity, because we’ve learnt to play as a team rather than as individuals.

But in the short sweep of history, a couple of “outsiders” – players who haven’t been in the India-bubble for a long time, who break up the (comfortable) unity of the team – will surely help. 

The team can be united without the players thinking and sounding alike. What Khalil Gibran's Prophet said about marriage, "let there be spaces in your togetherness", applies to teamwork as well.

Virat's team needs more independent characters, fresh voices, contrarian thoughts, un-synced emotions. The team needs more mood-makers who can pick up the baton when Kohli is just exhausted, who can balance him out, who can zig when the rest of the team are zagging. 

I don’t think this is going to happen. All the signals from the dressing room are that Virat Kohli will double down on the guys, especially the batters, already in the playing eleven. Which means no "outsiders". Faith easily hardens into stubbornness.

If it’s any consolation, even the best Indian companies - Infosys, Tata Sons, HDFC Bank - have all had their share of difficulties in renewing their executive teams. Its not easy, but it is worth it. 

MSD: Bill Gates :: VK : Steve Jobs
Did Steve Jobs have strong voices around him?

PS: Yes, I could use this thought for a corporate workshop on building an executive team with resilience and bench-strength...


Sunday 24 January 2021

Virat Kohli deserves credit for India’s amazing win in Australia

Team India at the Gabba with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 

Victory at the Gabba! What an amazing win! What incredible attitude, spunk, guts and gumption!

Rishabh and Siraj celebrate
India’s amazing test series victory in Australia was achieved while India’s captain and best batsman - Virat Kohli - was away on paternity leave. So, for the past week my social media feed has been buzzing with snarky memes about how Team India is better off without superstar Kohli, or with TED talk style meditations on how “servant leaders” like Ajinkya Rahane are more effective than “alpha leaders” like Virat.

These memes are missing the point. Kohli deserves a ton of credit for this win.

Kohli’s biggest contribution to this moment was in making winning test series abroad India’s #1 priority.

In the later years of MS Dhoni’s captaincy that commitment was never clear. There was always a feeling that Dhoni’s test team were going through the motions rather than playing with belief, intent, or purpose. That sense of drift was obvious on the abysmal England tours of 2011 and 2014. It seemed obvious that MSD enjoyed limited overs cricket more than test matches. The fog never really lifted until Dhoni retired from test cricket.

At that time, it was easy to imagine that Indian cricket would become IPL-land, happy to have some T20 fun, but with no higher aspirations. With a different leader that could easily have happened.

Fortunately, Kohli never had any doubts that his ambition was to make India a great test team.

He brought in other leaders, like Ravi Shastri, who shared this vision. He committed to the workload of playing more tests, to the more arduous scheduling, to the fitness culture needed to maintain a pack of 8-10 genuine quick bowlers who could bowl with intensity after an entire day’s play in any conditions. Kohli prepped India's test team with away-wins in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, with home wins against New Zealand, South Africa England and Australia before setting out to conquer the final frontier – away wins in the SENA nations.

That prize almost eluded him. With a bit of luck India could have won in South Africa in 2017-18. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 208 in Cape Town and 287 Pretoria. With a bit more luck India could have won in England in 2018. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 195 in Birmingham and 245 in Southampton. Compare that with the 328 we hunted down against a better attack in Brisbane.

Mother Cricket finally smiled down on Kohli’s team when India finally beat Australia in Australia in 2018-19 for the first time in history. Captain Kohli’s noble quest hadn’t been in vain. The final frontier had been conquered.

If India had the resources to win again in Australia in 2020-21, it is in significant part because of Kohli’s legacy. There is nothing inevitable about having a team of young test players with the chutzpah to beat the Aussies in Australia. Kohli’s ambition, faith and patient team building set this win up.

The point is not to take anything away from the rest of the leadership group.

Most great achievements have many fathers. Rahane’s calm, Shastri’s mental toughness, even Bharat Arun’s tactical nous all contributed to this glorious moment. But leadership is about more than being the khadoos Maratha rock the rest of the team bat around, it is about more than being calm presence in the dressing room, it is more than making the smart field placings. Leadership is also about having a vision for what we will achieve together and having the resourcefulness and patience to develop a team to deliver on that vision. To that extent the leader who gave us the joy of Brisbane 2021 is the nappy-changing daddy Kohli.

Let there be no doubt that Virat has fire in his belly...

...even if he does have a softer side.

Note: I was surfing the web for pictures of Virat and Anushka with the daughter, who was born on the day India saved the Sydney test. The photos on the net right now are all stock images or fakes.