Book Review: A Century Is Not Enough By Sourav Ganguly

A Century Is Not Enough
By Sourav Ganguly, co-written with Gautam Bhattacharya
Published by Juggernaut
Pages 258

It was on a sunny winter day in December 1995 when, as a schoolboy, I watched Sourav Ganguly on a cricket ground for the first time. He was dismissed for a paltry nine runs in Bengal’s first innings (that’s what West Bengal’s team is still called in domestic cricket) against Bihar in a Ranji Trophy league match at Patna’s Moin-ul-Haq stadium. Earlier he had bowled two overs when Bihar batted. As an India discard for last three years, the small crowd at the stadium either didn’t recognise the man or wasn’t interested in him.

It was Bengal skipper and left-arm spinner Utpal Chatterjee who was getting more attention as he had recently played for India in three one-day games. After being bowled by Subroto Banerjee, Sourav could be seen in the player’s area listening to his teammates talk.

He had walked in with a pair of black floaters, looking thin and quite uninterested in the fate of the East Zone game. Former Test opener and Bengal veteran Arun Lal was steering the conversations with what appeared from a distance to be his supply of dressing room jokes. Sourav smiled at few of them with an air of nonchalance.

There was something to suggest that instead of his immediate dismissal what was still rankling him was the Anderson Cummins’ incoming ball. The delivery had trapped him leg before in a triangular one-day series match at  Gabba, Brisbane, three years ago. He hadn’t played for India after that.

What, however, was more palpable was a feeling that he didn’t seem to be the sort of raconteur who talks about an ongoing game while looking back at his playing days. That had nothing to do with the irrelevance of a domestic cricket league game for an international star which he was going to emerge the following summer in England (1996).

The feeling was rooted in a perception that such cricketers become poor guides to their cricketing years. It’s primarily because their accounts are too selective to make the retrospective gaze meaningful beyond their cherrypicked narratives.

Therein lies the key failure of Ganguly’s autobiography A Century Is Not Enough, co-written with cricket journalist Gautam Bhattacharya. It’s similar to a middle-aged Bengali bhadra lok intellectual who can rattle off even his/her school examination marks while pontificating over the primacy of knowledge over academic records. Similarly, if he did well in a match, Ganguly comes across as a cricketer who will not miss reminding you of his individual scores and the wickets he took while pontificating about the primacy of the team’s cause.

The eternal victim?

His failures, and they were numerous, are often couched with a subtext of victimhood as if to suit his narrative of a fighter against odds.That’s the second major failure of this attempt at writing an autobiography. In his effort to produce a maudlin, motivational story from tales of his self-pity-inducing struggles and often exaggerated triumphs in his career, Ganguly has squandered the opportunity of chronicling two decades of cricketing history through the prism of one of its most important characters.

In its three parts and 17 chapters, the autobiography descends into an ego trip searching for spots of glory and magnified episodes of battles against, sometimes real and sometimes self-pity inducing ones, adversities. It’s far from a first-hand view of a leading cricketer’s journey through the cricketing landscape of his times.

It’s not that the book is without its moments. After being dropped from the national squad following an uneventful Austrian tour of 1991-92, the only exclusion he takes graciously, his account of making a comeback with a debut Test century at Lord’s is meticulously evocative with details of the anxieties and mental battles that a young international cricketer goes through.The instant response to the first flush of success is more a feeling of relief of having arrived at the international stage rather than taking a moment to rejoice the performance itself.

But even Ganguly’s road to a successful Test debut in 1996 isn’t something a less-resourceful and young Indian cricketer can probably identify with.

“My father made sure that every summer I went to England to further my cricketing education,” Ganguly writes in the third chapter. Such overseas exposure to cricket coaching is a privilege only a handful of cricketers in India can relate to. And then to know that the Prince of Kolkata also had a second home in London during his struggling days makes him even more distant from the everyday lives of a majority of the country’s aspiring cricketers.

His subsequent recounting of being dropped for the Toronto one-day series against Pakistan and the anxieties that followed are more identifiable. As Imran Khan rightly tells Ganguly in their meeting in England, unless one is far above the competition, such whims and fancies of selection would be the fate of many claimants on national teams.

He did return to the national team in the next edition of the Toronto series in 1997 and it turned out to be his most memorable performance in public memory. With consistent scores with the bat and penetrative seam bowling in helpful conditions, he scripted four wins as India wrapped the series 4-1 against Pakistan.

That performance ensured he avoided selection worries for a considerable period of time. That, however, saw a very lean period of unremarkable performances from him—a period which he conveniently ignores while assessing his playing years.

The 1998 Test series against the touring Australian side, the 1999 series against the touring Pakistan side (except a fleeting mention of the Kolkata Test at his home ground) and the Indian team’s Australian tour of 1999-2000 were three of the most significant encounters for India in the period.

Ganguly had failed in all of them. He glosses over them in the book. Apart from the 183 against a lacklustre Sri Lankan side at Taunton where Rahul Dravid also slammed a ton, even his string of failures in India’s doomed World Cup campaign of 1999 is conspicuous by its absence.

His vulnerability against short-pitch bowling and inability to develop a leg-side game to complement his skilful off-side strokeplay were becoming obvious in the period. Unsurprisingly, in a book filled with motivational homilies about the triumph of spirit, his take on such technicalities are missing. That’s a pity given his illuminating technical insights while commentating on live TV.

Leadership and performance

Even during his tenure as captain in the first five years of the naughties, he fell for making his indifferent batting peripheral to his leadership role. It’s this role that occupies the second part of his book as he talks about the memorable wins in the 2001 Test series against Australia, the Headingley Test win in England in 2002 followed by a shirt-waving NatWest final triumph, the Adelaide Test win in Australia in 2003 and the successful 2004 Pakistan tour.

Apart from the already known tales—almost folklore now—about the attitudinal shift in the Indian team under his captaincy, there is little in the book to substantiate that perception. What, moreover, is baffling is that for a man who supposedly placed such a premium over victory, a drawn 2003-2004 Test series in Australia be recounted in a triumphant tone. Similarly, how coming second best to Australia in the 2003 World Cup final at Johannesburg couldn’t be seen as an achievement for an ambitious leader!

For the differential that Ganguly himself and his fans associated with his brand of leadership, ‘moral victories’ should have been a poor substitute for actual wins that matter on a cricket field.

Moreover, how could his memoirs be so sketchy about, or even oblivious to, the 2004 home Test series loss to Australia?

His account seems to rest his distinction as a leader on his legacy of identifying talent, persisting with them and allowing them to play fearlessly. That must have clearly benefitted a generation of cricketers—Yuvraj Singh, Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Mohammad Kaif to name a few—but it came with its own trappings. Different captains of different eras can claim the same. 

Missing Nagma and Nagpur

The book also skips some important controversial episodes which surfaced under his captaincy. All of them weren’t cricketing though. One may remember media speculations about his alleged affair with actress Nagma. Ganguly was already married to Dona when some media reports in 2001 talked about his visit to a  temple in South India and performing a puja temple with the South Indian actress. Although his family denied the affair, the actress is yet to rule out the existence of such a relationship at a particular point in her life.

“As long as there is no denial of each other’s existence in each other’s life, any person can say anything they want,” Nagma told a women’s magazine. “There was a career at stake, besides other things, so one had to part. One had to weigh a lot of things, rather than be on an ego trip and insist on being together.”

Even cricketing controversies have been selectively dealt in the book. His decision to pull out of the third Test of the 2004 home series against Australia at Nagpur has been attributed to reasons other than a groin injury, the official reason. There were speculations that he was unhappy with the green track prepared for the game after he had asked for a track that could help the home team’s spin bowlers. His critics speculated that the fear of losing a home series made him retreat from the playing field.

It’s the sort of speculation that didn’t die down with time as two leading Australian cricketers hinted at the same in their autobiographical accounts: opening batsman Matthew Hayden’s Standing My Ground ( 2010) and wicketkeeper-batsman Adam Gilchrist’s True Colours (2008).

But one can still only be sceptical about the real reasons for his absence from the Test and give Ganguly a marginal benefit of doubt.

The Chappell Days

The controversy which has predictably hogged space in the book is one about his strained equations with Greg Chappell and his subsequent ouster from the Indian team. While the former was obviously a case of clash of two different types of personalities fighting a turf war for their respective control over the team-not very different from hierarchal battles of command one comes across in modern offices.

It’s the latter where Ganguly fails to tell the full story and often deflects it to weave a victimhood-laden tale of suffering because of a coach’s bruised ego. One must not forget that a string of low scores and insipid batting performances over a period of two years had made it difficult for the Indian captain to earn his place as a player in the team. While the jury is still out on what could have led to his exclusion, it wasn’t surprising to many who were increasingly finding him a batting liability. Ganguly, besides giving his account of his frosty equations with the coach, could have given more perspectives on this rather long-struggling period with his form.

Expectedly, his ouster did provoke outrage among his fans, particularly a vocal section of Bengalis who had found in him the first cricketing icon of the state in post-secondary liberalisation India, far eclipsing the appeal of Pankaj Roy from a different era.

In an earlier part of the book, Ganguly admits that this Bengali appropriation of his stardom contributed to amplifying his fame within a short period of time.

The sizeable presence of professionals from the state in national media, however, was also a less studied factor in mobilising support for him. Eventually, ad makers for soft drink giant Pepsi used the controversy to produce a rather corny commercial disguised as an emotional appeal—Mera Naam Sourav Ganguly. Bhule Toh Nahi?

It’s in this phase when he gives glimpses of an individual’s perspectives and anxieties in modern competitive sports. It’s a prism through which you look at key players and performance of a team in which you are trying to break into desperately. You tend to get disappointed with their convincing wins and remarkable performances of players you intend to replace. So were Ganguly and his father when Indians were sealing comfortable victories while he was out of the team.

His Test comeback against South Africa was solid, if not dramatic. What, however, he shared with the Indian team was common misery and backlash following an early exit from the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. He followed it with a moderately successful run in England, though not spectacular enough to cement a stable place for himself.  Next year he decided to call it a day after the Nagpur Test against Australia, not before hitting a memorable double hundred against Pakistan in Bangalore earlier that year.

Ganguly begins with the thoughts leading to his calm decision of retiring from international cricket in 2008. It’s one of the few well-written chapters in the book. The accounts of his stints with and leadership of two Indian Premier League (IPL) teams, Kolkata Knight Riders and Pune Warriors, are too fresh in public memory to offer any interesting revisiting. However, they do provide a first-hand peep into the teething problems that management-players equations led to in the formative stage of the T20 league. Some of those fault-lines still persist.

In a sporting autobiography doubling up as motivational literature, there is always a risk of falling for cliches and repetitive homilies. The book succumbs to such costs and sounds too didactic in its tenor—trying to draw too much meaning from moments that are meaningless at the core. That’s a pitfall of narrating your professional life with the pompous subtext of life lessons.

Coming after the insightful and very candidly written memoirs of his far less successful senior, Sanjay Manjrekar, this book by one of India’s most talked about cricketers disappoints with its overdose of narcissistic gaze. In doing so he has frittered away a chance to offer us a more observant and rounded first account of his years in Indian cricket.

That could be a vice of an insular autobiography. Ironically, to rephrase the book’s title, it ends up doing what in cricketing parlance is snubbed as— playing for the century.