A reluctant prince of the eighth ring of Hell

Some of the best pieces of writing have involved a narrator looking at the play of fate from an unconventional vantage point, and in recent times, anyone becomes such a narrator simply by becoming a coach of the Indian men's cricket team. In my opinion, the task alone is not exceptionally hard. In fact, just as Feynman once remarked that the best teacher is one who would explain concepts in physics to the first man he meets on the streets, the best coach - and therefore one who has surmounted the hardest times - is one who can make world-class players out of the first eleven men spotted on the roads.

Neither Duncan Fletcher nor Gary Kirsten find immediate qualification on that regard. They may have been good coaches, but neither of them joined the team when it was struggling with anything. Sure, Tendulkar may have been in poor form; sure, Harbhajan may not have been bowling on the right areas; sure, Nehra might be suffering too many injuries - in all these times, the team as a whole was never in danger.



So what is being expected of Fletcher? A maintenance of form is surely first on the list: no team would want to slip all that dramatically from occupying one of the top two spots of most ranking lists. More importantly, as is now evident with the team's tour of West Indies underway, the coach will also be expected to take charge of the fifteen young guns: crudely speaking, it doesn't look so much like a transition as a gladiatorial program, a survival-of-the-fittest arena that carbs out the best fit to a retiring veteran.

Fletcher will have to assuage the worries of the hard-workers, Fletcher will have to moderate the stupefactions of the smarter ones with his wisdom, Fletcher will have to suffer the novice stressed under both expectations and aspirations, and Fletcher will have to secure the cricketing future of a blood-lusting nation. The only manner in which he qualifies to differ from his predecessors is not because the expectations of him are monstrous - that is a familiar story - but because he now stands squarely between a group that has played good cricket and is now playing under almost no pressure and a group that has played for a much smaller duration and is now playing under quite a bit of pressure. Fletcher is the person the first frustrated finger will point at whensoever there is a failure to please.

Furthermore, it doesn't help that Fletcher has made a name for himself in the international arena as a man who specializes in revitalizing teams on the decline to teams that are decidedly formidable: England's reputation as a puny Test opponent was reversed almost as soon as he took charge in 1999, and despite a poor ODI showing in the eight years that followed, a inspectorial review of Fletcher's performance became necessary only in late 2007. In light of his latest appointment, all of those credentials become rarefied because his achievements to date have been accrued in less-charged and less-politically-embroiled environments, where his manoeuvrability has been unimpeded, where his long-term credentials found the sort of public understanding to overwhelm a temporary defect.

In India, all those things are beyond luxuries: they are impossibilities. Imagine being the head of an organization whose success finds you in good standing with the weakest section of the population - the audience - while failures find you in poor standing with the strongest section of the population - the infamous Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) - and now imagine the amount of political cushioning one might require to sustain such torture.

Essentially, there remains nothing to be said on any note that stands to be constructive: conflicts are essential in the gauging of compatibility, and even though the stated bigger picture will not deviate much from its truism in the games to come, a timid disciplinarian such as Fletcher has to find that uncommon clearing where the BCCI, the National XI and the Indian fans find common ground, where he can retreat to to effectively separate himself from the hoi polloi of criticism continuously flecking the team he will be fighting to build.