They say, do not renew Greg Chappell’s contract, divest Rahul Dravid of the captaincy, ask Virendra Sehwag to retire, bid farewell to Anil Kumble, tell Mahendra Singh Dhoni to chop off his blond locks (and never dye his hair again), appoint Sourav Ganguly as coach (that way you rid him from the team but keep Bengal happy — crucial since Eden Garden resides in Kolkata) — and above all, drop Sachin Tendulkar.

We say, sure go ahead and do all of those, but first, sack the media.

On second thoughts, don’t just sack the media, ransack it. Deflate the tyres of their outside broadcast vans, snatch the microphones and cameras out of their hands, pull down their satellites, protest outside their offices, better still enter them and tear down their studios - most of all, burn their effigies and deface their photographs — or paint your TV screens black just where their faces normally appear. Do this every time they let us down, make an error, get the plot all wrong. In other words, roughly what many of our cricketers did in the matches against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Let’s guillotine the media, the way the media has been asking for their heads.

Who converted mere mortals into cricketing superheroes? The media — and the viewer who watches the coverage and begins to believe it. Who made everyone believe, including the players themselves that they were better than the best? The media. Who refused to believe the evidence of their eyes in the recent losses in West Indies and said that we were not just conquerors of the Caribbean but possibly of Australia and South Africa? The media and all the current cricketers, ex-cricketers, the cricket historians, the crystal ball gazers, the tarot card readers, the numerologists who assessed our chances on air — all of whom were either short-sighted or plain did not want to see?

... contd.