The Indian team at the start of one of its FIH World Cup matches

One of the spin-offs in a career in which writing and commenting on cricket seems to have taken precedence – despite having been to Olympic Games, Asian Games, SAF Games and numerous other non cricket sporting events – is that I have not been in touch with a whole generation of Indian hockey players.

A quirk of fate offered me a chance to make some headway in that direction when I got to spend some quality time with some players last week. In fact, I got to chat up with a couple of them from the Indian squad that took the field in the Hero Honda FIH World Cup on a 15-minute drive and we were able to exchange notes on a number of contemporary issues facing Indian hockey.

One of the pet peeves of the contemporary player is that their predecessors keep insisting that they do not work as hard as they did in their time. “I believe that if we had played in their era, we could have played three matches in a day. Such was the pace at which hockey was played then,” one of the players told me.

Now, that may be debatable but the players – like the modern cricketers who believe that past players are making a living by commenting on their performances – do have a point about some of the former stars being a little uncharitable towards the present squad. For I have always believed that former players have a responsibility towards the sport that they played so passionately and follow with similar intensity now.

If I tended to agree with the spirit of that statement I was in disagreement with what came next – and it had to do with payments. “We don’t get compensated for the amount of work we put in at training,” the player said, pointing out that unlike in the past when National camps were not year-long affairs.

“Players could spend time with their families and turn out for their respective employers’ teams in the domestic circuit. Now, we do not spend much time at home and find it hard to play for our employers,” he said. I pointed out that money was not the reason they had picked up the hockey stick the first time and said I believed their recent strike was unjustified.

“You talked of dues when you were not contracted to get any amounts from your Federation,” I said. “I am not against you making money but I disagreed with your method. If you were seeking player contracts and graded payments, you should have got into negotiations with the Federation and convinced them like the cricketers did a few years ago.”

To their credit, both players did not show any signs of animosity and heard me out when I explained how the then captain Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath spent close to two years convincing officials of the Board of Control for Cricket in India that graded payments needed to be introduced.

“I agree that we started playing because we were passionate about it and did not expect to be rewarded for pursuing our passion,” he says. “But having coming along and having proved ourselves to be the best in the land, is it unfair to expect to be compensated? And, don’t you think many youngsters would be drawn to the game if we make it lucrative enough?”

Of course, I said. And since we had arrived at our destination, it was time to drop them with promises to stay in touch and share notes and ideas.

This piece was written for www.stick2hockey.com

He has meant different things to different people. His captains – from Mohammed Azharuddin through Rahul Dravid – have found him to be a reliable match-winner, each of his team-mates has held him in awe and opposing batsmen have respectfully feared him. It is a pity that the masses did not really accord him hero status that he so deserves.

What has he meant to me? He has been a champion bowler, a wonderful human being and a great friend. And I would like to believe that he has respected me for not ever using the friendship to seek information about the team or its players despite having known him from the time he was known as K Anil and played under-19 cricket for Karnataka.

They dismissed him as a non-spinner even then. Kumble, him of the spiritual charm, radiated a calmness but he had no hesitation in wearing the mask of the marauder, the Smiling Assassin.

The bespectacled lad insisted that there was more to spin bowling than merely getting the ball to turn off the wicket. He understood that not too many realised he spun the ball as much as anyone else. The huge difference was that he mainly afforded the cricket ball top-spin while the conventional spinners imparted side-spin.

But what set him apart from many others was his hunger. “I look to take a wicket off each delivery,” he said. For more than two decades, he relentlessly pursued quality, stayed hungry and let landmarks come to him. He stumbled in the final months but it won’t make him a lesser cricketer, having been a part of 43 Test victories.

Back in 1990, when he made his Test debut in England, few would have dared predict such a long career, let alone a heady haul as 619 Test wickets – and 956 international wickets for him. He came off as an unlikely answer to India’s search for a match-winning spinner who would serve the team for years.

After the exit of the famed quartet, Ravi Shastri, Dilip Doshi and Shivlal Yadav had all claimed more than 100 wickets each while L Sivaramakrishnan, Maninder Singh Narendra Hirwani and Venkatapathi Raju showed glimpses of potential but none of them achieved as much as Kumble.

After an unspectacular start, Kumble came into his own on India’s tour of South Africa in 1992-93. Since then, he has been the mechanical engineer who specialises in demolition jobs on the cricket field. His engineering background gives him an unmatched understanding of angles and of the behaviour of the cricket ball of different surfaces.

I asked him after he took over from Kapil Dev as India’s most successful bowler if he would like to say something to his criticis. His response was typical Kumble. “This is not the time for me to thumb my nose at critics who have kept saying I don’t spin the ball. Instead, this is the time for me to quietly reflect on my art and look ahead at getting better,” he said.

“How can I forget how my bowling partners have been instrumental, too? Cricket statistics does not record bowling partnerships in the same way as stands between batsmen. There have been a number of bowlers, spinners and seamers alike, who have bowled at the other end and contributed to my haul.”

He never looked over his shoulder for he felt that it would make him weak but constantly worked on his self-belief to move towards perfection. It was this quest and the constant discovery of new facets to bowling that made his journey so memorable.

A day after India had beaten Pakistan in a heady quarterfinal of the 1996 World Cup in Bangalore, I was off to have a quiet chat with Kumble in his new apartment in Jayanagar. We met there and later drove to his parents’ home not far away to have a wonderful lunch, topping it up with the most amazing payasam I have had away from home.

A couple of years ago he joined world billiards champion Geet Sethi, former Test cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar and Olympian sprinter Ashwini Nachappa in conducting a management workshop for corporates. And I had the opportunity of watching him prepare his presentation on resilience. He spoke at length about developing the ability to bounce back – citing examples from his own career – but more than his oration, the quality of his preparation left me stunned and gave me an insight into how seriously he took any task.

To be sure, he has nearly always drawn attention to his deeds, rarely to himself. He has shown much character, When his right arm was in a sling, he was the team camp everyday working with Harbhajan Singh and the other spinners. When his jaw was broken in the West Indies, he squeezed 10 overs and prised out Brian Lara’s wicket before flying home. Such men are rare.

All good things must come to an end, of course, but I can’t quite believe that the trademark flipper and top-spinner that spelt doom for batsmen facing Kumble will no longer be in evidence. Yet, even if the engineer who specialised in destruction of opposition batting for close to two decades will not be around, he left us memories.

It has been a long and eventful journey since debut at Old Trafford in August 1990 but one that has been undertaken with few tantrums and no scandal. All said and done, he found no greater joy than in contributing to the team’s cause. Yet, the Smiling Assassin – who occasionally scowled in anguish – remained simple, modest and genial. (November 2, 2008).

He was instantly recognised and, of course, the newlyweds wanted to have a photograph taken with him. Kumble agreed gamely. We won’t know but years from now, the couple might point him out in the photo and tell their kids, “That’s Kumble, he beat the invincible Aussies at the WACA, where no team had won in almost a decade.”Kumble can surely claim a fair share of the glory. The triumph was a tribute to his indomitable spirit; the historic win made many (some still grudgingly) attribute leadership qualities to a man often respected only for his dour resolve. It’s possible the Indians could lose the Adelaide Test. But even as this report is being written, on the first day of the Test, it can be declared: Kumble is just the man the Indian team needed at the helm. The unassuming Bangalorean has reinvented himself—and with it remapped the heights this India XI can scale.

But the unwavering attention can also be a bit of a bother, for it leaves little time for other pursuits. For instance, Kumble rues the fact that on this tour he’s had little time to wield the camera. “You know, the sunset over the Swan river in Perth can be majestic,” he smiles. “I wish I had the time to capture it on film.” But then, as they say, the best images are those preserved in memory. And there will be plenty for Kumble to pick from the current Oz tour once he hangs up his boots.

And to think this man was nearly relegated to the ranks of those “possible captains” (M.L. Jaisimha was a prime example), recognised as capable leaders but who never got to lead the Indian team. Indeed, Kumble’s captaincy was decreed more by chance than design. First, Rahul Dravid quit the post, saying that an Indian skipper has only so much shelf life. Then Sachin Tendulkar indicated he did not want a job he had renounced in 2000. There was also M.S. Dhoni—India’s ODI captain—but the selectors deemed the charismatic posterboy too callow to take charge of a team comprising three ex-skippers.

The selectors were in a quandary—only to be delighted when Kumble put his hand up out of the blue. “Three days before I was named captain, I had no idea about it. I was just answering a reporter’s query on whether I’d be available to lead the Test squad in the Pakistan series,” he recalls modestly. The man of the moment was popularly perceived then as a stopgap captain, a bridge between two generations before the baton was to be passed on to men like Dhoni.

But the efficacy of his stalking flippers and his astuteness as skipper means he could well be retained at the helm till 2008-end. Kumble became the first captain in nearly three decades to notch a series victory over Pakistan at home. Then came the tour Down Under. The first Test was lost, ditto the second game in Sydney, all the more worse for bad blood spilt on and off the field and acrimony in the national presses. Even the tour seemed in jeopardy.

Less stoic individuals would have caved in. But the man they call the Silent Assassin rallied the team behind a beleaguered Harbhajan. Kumble impressed with his grace and dignity in Sydney. There wasn’t the clatter of rancour towards the opposition, but a calm firmness that rang out loud all over Australia. “There was only one team that played cricket in the true spirit,” he said, referring to the final day when in its desperation to win a record-equalling 16th Test, Australia claimed catches that were neither nicked nor taken cleanly. He further said the gentlemen’s agreement with Ponting would be reviewed. Kumble had his way, decisions on debatable close-in catches would now be the umpires’ call rather than accepting the fielder’s word.

Diplomacy of even the cricketing kind demands a deft sense of timing. So, after his team had made its point, Kumble demonstrated his statesmanship by stepping back and letting the BCCI fight the race battle. He confined himself to inspiring the team to focus on cricket, helping craft a stunning victory in Perth.

Communication is Kumble’s key. His understudy Dhoni offered an insight: “What he has stressed is that there should be lots of communication between us. If somebody hasn’t been picked for the side, you have to go there and convey it to him. There shouldn’t be any gap between the player and the captain. He has been very clear about what he expects from the players.” It is this clear expression of expectation that has endeared Kumble the captain to his players, the more bolstered for being India’s greatest match-winning bowler.

Not only has he allayed worries about his being a bowling captain (who tend to over- or under-bowl themselves), he has harnessed to his leadership the same clarity of thought and studied instinct honed over years in the bowling business. Thus his decision to bring Sourav Ganguly on against Pakistan in Delhi and Sehwag in the Perth Test. About the last, he said, “I wanted two spinners and Viru’s off-spin was a better option than Sachin’s leg-spin. There was a left-hander (Gilchrist) at the crease and Viru was a natural choice.” Sehwag promptly bagged the wickets of the dangerous Gilchrist and Brett Lee.

The top job in Indian cricket involves unrelenting pressure and stress. It has undone many. Not Kumble, though. He didn’t allow Sydney nor the selection of the ODI team to become distractions, dismissing suggestions that Ganguly’s exclusion from the ODI squad could spell trouble for his squad in the Adelaide Test. “There are no distractions. I see them as challenges. I am sure there are people in the team who are disappointed for not being picked. But they have played enough cricket to understand that the Adelaide match is crucial, not just for them but for Indian cricket. I have explained the situation and they are professional enough to give their best. I expect nothing else from them.”

A couple of years ago, Kumble joined the likes of world billiards champ Geet Sethi and ex-cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar in talking to corporate honchos at a workshop in Delhi. He spoke about resilience, and its critical role in life. When he retires, Jumbo can also talk about how to lead, or, as Australians would say, “to be as game as Ned Kelly”.