World T20 has been as much about cricket as it has been about gestures.
Sport cannot exist in a vacuum, isolated from what is happening around the world. The emphasis is placed on the gestures not made in the gestures made on the playing field. If the Indian cricket team took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter – a nice gesture – together they were telling us about the lives that don’t hold back home.
World T20 has been as much about cricket as it has been about gestures. In India, we should remind ourselves of DLM (Dalit Lives Matter) and MLM (Muslim Lives Matter), but the players hide behind the cliché: Sports and politics should not be mixed. But they do, whether we like it or not. Decades ago George Orwell declared that all art is politics. Maybe the whole game is politics too. Cricket is often diplomacy (or war) by other means.
Black lives matter in India where West Indies cricketers have often complained of racist abuse from both spectators and colleagues. Dalit life, Muslim life, life of women, life of tribals, life of farmers also matters.
Had our players kneeled (or pointed something else) in support of DLM or MLM, they would have emerged as a bigger hero than winning the tournament. Maybe I am being unfair here, falling into the trap of expecting a small group of sportspersons and Bollywood stars to bring attention to national issues when their primary focus is on their profession. And while people in a better position to do so rarely do.
But then consider the effect of Virat Kohli’s statement in support of Mohammed Shami, a Muslim shamelessly trolled by people who feel more ‘Indian’ that way. Here’s a young man, a national icon, calling the act out for it, and reminding the disaffected, insecure, Islamophobes (many of whom see him as a cricketer) that his team is like this. will not affect its behavior.
“Our brotherhood, our friendship within the team, nothing can shake it,” he said, adding a line that every Indian is tired of sick and sick trolling of public figures, especially if they are Muslims, in broader context. should be taken in Nation itself. We stand with you, a powerful sentiment, and some consolation for those who, whatever their religion, have been falsely accused, imprisoned, and treated inhumanely.
Kohli has previously interacted at the national level and it is commendable. It doesn’t matter when he said it, but the message is clear. He wasn’t making excuses for defeat, he stood up for a teammate. That’s what captains do.
Obviously, Kohli himself has now attracted trolls for taking such a stand. His wife is also not spared, the mixture of non-sequitur and irrelevance barely disguising the magnitude of the attacks.
And he can expect his fans worse than trolls. The World T20 was not his biggest tournament; It was a tired, crumbling Indian team he was leading and neither all Dhoni nor all Shastri could put it together again. Too much cricket, too many days in the bubble, poor strategy, poor planning all contributed to India’s poor performance. He managed to take only two wickets in the first two matches, and hit just six sixes.
“Sometimes bubble fatigue, mental fatigue creep in when you’re doing the same thing over and over again,” Jasprit Bumrah said after the New Zealand match, and one can sympathize.
But this defeat could have been the best thing for India in T20 cricket. This can lead to a change in culture. This means the new captain and new coach will have a free hand to change the essentially conservative nature of India’s approach. T20 is a youth game, which needs a young captain who is not a safety-first, risk-averse leader, but takes chances.
It would be a mistake to hand over the captaincy to Rohit Sharma, who is elder, and belongs to the Kohli school. KL Rahul is on 30. In many ways the ideal choice would be Rishabh Pant.
He is young (he is just 24), developed into a player when T20 was already a thriving game and not something one had to accommodate, and he is the most dangerous batsman in the side. Teams try to build themselves around the image of the captain (both as a player and as a person), and India needs a T20 team like Pant.
It also means a change in personnel, the selectors doing away with stereotypes and selecting players from T20 tournaments, irrespective of their performance in first-class or Test cricket. There is a need for experts in T20 and they need to recognize that.
Kohli himself is only 33 years old. He has built a strong side that any young captain would be happy to inherit.
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