MELBOURNE: India’s controversial former cricket coach Greg Chappell claims the biggest regret of his tumultuous three-year stint there was the fallout with senior batsman Sachin Tendulkar with whom he simply failed to “communicate” properly.
Chappell, who served as India coach from 2005 to 2007, admitted in his new autobiography Fierce Foucs that he tried to push hurried improvements in the team which led to his downfall, especially after his relations with senior players such as Tendulkar soured.
“My biggest regret was falling out with Sachin over him batting at number four in the one-day team. It was a shame because he and I had some intense and beneficial talks together prior to that. My impatience to see improvement across the board was my undoing in the end,” writes the former Australian captain.
“The mistakes I made were not particularly ‘western’ but the same kind of mistakes I’d made as a captain in my playing days. I didn’t communicate my plans well enough to the senior players. I should have let guys like Tendulkar, (VVS) Laxman and (Virender) Sehwag know that although I was an agent of change, they were still part of our Test future.
“When I did communicate with them, I was sometimes too abrupt. Once in South Africa, I called in Sachin and Sehwag to ask more of them, I could tell by the look on their faces that they were affronted,” he recalled.
“Later (Rahul) Dravid, who was in the room, said ‘Greg, they’ve never been spoken to like that before’,” he wrote.
In one of the chapter titled ‘A New Hope’, Chappell revealed that during his tenure he got to understand the kind of pressure Indian cricketers lived with, especially Tendulkar.
“A glimpse of them was a life-changing event…We were playing an unrelenting amount of cricket to satisfy the demand, at least 50 per cent more than Australia were playing and the pressure was beyond belief,” he wrote.
“Nobody was carrying that pressure more than Sachin. Not even Don Bradman carried expectations like this, and Sachin had been bearing it since 1989,” he said.
Chappell revealed that he had asked Tendulkar to have a day off but the veteran batsman never wanted to because of the expectations of him.
“If he didn’t train and then performed badly, he’d have been blamed. People would notice. And there was no relief for him going out onto the streets, either. He just couldn’t get any rest,” he explained.
Chappell wrote that once he asked Tendulkar that it would be hard to find time to keep in touch with his friends due to India’s tight schedule, to which Tendulkar replied ‘Greg, you would have more friends in India than I’ve got.
“This is how it is to be Sachin Tendulkar,” Chappell wrote. (PTI)
