Vinod Kambli was one of the most flamboyant and talented batsmen in the 1990s. Someone who entered the cricketing scene with a world record partnership of 664 runs during his school days, back to back double centuries in test cricket all before he turned 23, fastest Indian to 1000 test runs, he surely had it all to become the world’s greatest batsman. Then came a minor blip where he struggled against short pitched bowling. What was assumed to be a flaw that can be corrected became his nemesis. Bowlers found him wanting bowling short. One blow in his fledgling career and he couldn’t combat it, causing a premature exit to his test career at 24.
While Vinod Kambli was shattering records at one point in his career, someone from Colombo had a nightmare debut scoring a pair (0 & 0). He went back to domestic cricket after he was dropped, came back after 21 months and scored a 0 and 1. Dropped again and this time he worked harder than ever before, sorting his flaws scoring bulk of domestic runs and returned to international cricket after 17 months only to score another pair! 1 run combined in 6 innings. He was side-lined and everybody wrote him off. Only one person knew that he could grind it out again and come back stronger. Marvan Atapattu came back strongly after 3 years having waited 6 years to score his next run, going on to become one of the most dependable players for Sri Lanka with a test century against all test playing nations!
Two similar stories in the 2010s: Rohit Sharma and Cheteswer Pujara. One was oozing class in limited overs cricket but struggled to cement his place in tests despite consistent backing. The other is more of an orthodox cricketer with textbook cricket shots. Despite grinding it out at the highest level and was touted to be the next Wall of Indian cricket, time and again he had to reaffirm his worth with strong back from his coach Kumble.
We can put these 4 curious cases with the following interpretation:
- Just like the first quadrant in math has a (+,+) notion, here it denotes that one had the backing and proved – Pujara
- The second quadrant (-,+): one did not have the backing yet proved his worth – Atapattu
- The third quadrant (-,-): one did not have the backing and he couldn’t prove his grit – Kambli
- And finally the fourth quadrant (+,-) one had consistent
backing and yet couldn’t prove – Rohit
Translating this story to an organization like Gramener, an open question is where are we in this quadrant?
