Steve Waugh writes in his autobiography ‘Out of My Comfort Zone‘:
The very instant I got wind tha cricket was to be played at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kaula Lumpur, I knew we had to send our top team and not the A team that was being proposed. The chance to mix with some of the elite of the sporting world in an environment ripe for learning, not to mention the chance to watch the action live and be part of a 439 member Australian team, was in my eyes the opportunity of a lifetime. It turned out to be one of the best two weeks of my sporting career and in some small way I’d like to think we added to the Games experience by bringing to the Aussie contingent a sense of team and mateship that was infectious.
The strangest thing about our participation was the expectation by some that we would be elitist, like the American basketball dream team at the Olympics, and stay outside the village. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. Every second night during the Games we would send out invitations to different sections of the Australian squad to join us for a few drinks in our dormitories. This was something that hadn’t been done before within the Games environment, and it was well appreciated. …. Handwashing clothes, and gathering breakfast from the food hall and bringing it back for each other was like going back in time to a school excursion. It was one big adventure, and I didn’t want to miss a thing.
Well, on the occasion of India being whitewashed in South Africa, I thought this made good and appropriate reading. Cricket, it is famously, said is a game played in between your ears. Skills alone do not matter and if they did, India should have been at least competitive in the five one dayers. Alas, after multiple coaches, therapists and technologists of various hue, we still have to figure out a few things. We could do worse than ask Steve Waugh.
By the way, India split its national squad into two teams in 1998 and sent one to Kaula Lumpur. The other went to Sharjah or to some such cash-tree holder.
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Wonder where they go from here.
India always had this problem of having “talented players” who’ve fired very little.
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