Silver bullets

There is a good point being made in the comments below by anonymous. Its best not to confuse the proclamations made by the media - largely infused with wishful thinking - with the self-assessments of a bunch of professionals. Certainly, Dravid or Chappell never promised anyone the world, and have been very measured in their assessments of the team's progress (there is a great deal in their interviews about the team's rebuilding being a long process). Its very easy to imagine, as one surveys the gap between the Indian team's performances and the breathless announcements of their imminent rise to the top made by the media the moment they win a match, that the players aren't keeping up. All they aren't keeping up with is the inflated sense of expectation. One should be wary of the impatience that underwrites most of these writings. This is evident in the urge to find a silver bullet the moment the latest disaster to come along strikes Indian cricket. Whatever the full story behind Ganguly's dropping from the Indian team, the sharp rise in the insistence that he be dropped (Dileep Premchandran over at Cricinfo being a good example) led me to think that these folks imagined that Ganguly was responsible for all that was wrong with Indian cricket: the catching problems, the last-day collapses (such as the one at Bangalore last year, which was blamed almost exclusively on Ganguly), the failure to finish off matches, and so on. Well, a year on, the problems still exist. If we are to praise the Dravid-Chappell combine for the introduction of youngsters and the new fighting spirit, lets not forget that Ganguly was famous for precisely those things, and whats more, the most famous wins both home and abroad came on his watch: Kolkata 2001, Headingley 2002, Adelaide 2003, Kandy 2001, or getting to the final of the World Cup in 2003. Ganguly was on his way out, but lets not imagine that he took all that was problematic with him.