Ganguly Leads The Way

Recently some arm-chair experts have tried to implicate Sourav Ganguly for India’s recent indifferent ODI results in England. First of all it must be clarified that India has had pretty good ODI results since Ganguly has returned to the side, the recent indifferent results against England notwithstanding.

In 2007 Ganguly has so far played 19 matches which had results with his team winning 63 percent (12 out of 19) of the matches. Only two of the matches won this year while Ganguly played have been against “minnow” teams: Bermuda in the World Cup and Ireland in Belfast. The rest of the 10 wins have come against proper opposition.

Interestingly Ganguly was “rested” for the relatively easy matches against Bangladesh in Bangladesh and the one-off match against Scotland in Scotland, otherwise his Win/Loss figures, as well as personal statistics, would almost certainly be even more impressive.

Now, lets look at the raw data. In twelve wins Ganguly has averaged 67 and in seven losses he has averaged 33. Clearly when he does well, India do well. But let us take an even closer look to see how important his contributions have been.

The first quite amazing statistic is that in each of these twelve wins Ganguly has scored in double figures, with a lowest score of 13 and highest score of 98. Additionally, nine out of twelve times he has reached forty runs or more.

Even more amazingly only twice was he the first player dismissed in these twelve matches, and India’s score was 134 and 113 on the two occasions when he was the first batsman dismissed. On the 10 other occasions it was his partner who was the first one dismissed.

But even thrice when his partner was dismissed very early, i.e. with the team score in single digits, Ganguly and the next man then added 31, 202, 162. So in addition to the three 100+ run opening stands Ganguly had with his opening partner, he had another two huge 150+ runs stands with the next man in.

Clearly Ganguly has proved the catalyst at the top of the innings to set India up for wins, whether setting a target or chasing for a win. And the number of times India has won setting up a target or chasing is nearly equal with seven wins batting first and five wins chasing.

Now let us see what happens when Ganguly is dismissed early. In the seven matches India have lost in 2007 with Ganguly in the team, he has still managed to average a relatively decent 33 runs per innings, with three fifties in those seven matches. However, unlike in the twelve matches won where he was never dismissed in single digits, here Ganguly was thrice dismissed in single figures.

Additionally four times out of seven, Ganguly was the first batsman dismissed. In the three matches he was not dismissed first, he ended up scoring fifties. But in these matches he was trying to piece together an innings in tatters, with the second wicket falling in the twenties and on one ocassion five batsmen dismissed with only seventy odd on the board.

On the other two occasions he ended up adding a hundred runs or more for the third wicket and left the team needing 90 odd runs to score with about 120 odd deliveries to go and six or more wickets in hand. So clearly, it was not entirely his fault that India failed to chase down those runs.

It is quite fashionable among the superficial observers of the game, and those with an agenda, or an axe to grind, to try and blame Sourav Ganguly for all sorts of problems with the Indian team, but clearly he is not the source of India’s batting woes. Indeed, he has been a key batsman whenever India has succeeded.

If one criticism can be made of Ganguly, it is that he has failed to carry on to a really big score after reaching at least forty in twelve out of the nineteen matches he has played since returning to the side. But no criticism can be made about the way he has been the vital glue, holding the brittle Indian batting together at the top of the innings. When the glue is missing, almost always the batting then crumbles.