“Is India really coming here?” a cricket writer from West Indies called to ask me last week. “I mean, really,” he stressed. I told him they were. He rang off, still unconvinced. I was told later that he wasn’t the only one sceptical about the tour. Some of the West Indies players, certain that India would not embark on such a meaningless journey, were planning to book themselves on holidays that they will now have to take at another time.

For captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, it’s a no-win situation. His tired team, already facing their first public trial in two years, will have to switch on again for a tournament where a win will be dismissed with shrugs of ‘who cares’ and a defeat will further strengthen the case for their dismissal.

The players always say how playing for India is motivation itself, but Dhoni & Co will really have to dig into their reserves to find any for this assignment. For, as one of the fathers of modern management, Peter Drucker, once wrote: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Victory when needed most

The poetic justice behind Pakistan’s World T20 win has been the theme of this week. How badly they needed it; how the victory manifested that cricket in the country would not die even though it is resigned to a nomadic existence for the next few years. And it’s strange that a number of other World Cup wins in the past, too, have come at times when they were needed the most. In 1996, Sri Lanka was reeling from terror attacks that prompted West Indies and Australia to boycott matches in the country. One of the outsiders of world cricket back then, dismissed as a team the sport could survive without, they were so emphatic that even midway through the tournament they looked destined to win — as if some outside force was willing them on.

... contd.