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Dual Powered

An unlikely friendship between India's captain and his deputy holds the key to the team's future

By Sharda Ugra in Colombo

	LEADING LIGHTS: Dravid and Ganguly

Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid are standing in the opulent lobby of the Taj Samudra in Colombo listening to talk of the wild world of Indian cricket. The people around them are discussing the board elections in September and when the familiar name of a prospective office-bearer is named, a sly smile crosses Ganguly's face. "Jam, heard that? If that happens, pack your bags." Dravid, who must have inarguably the most moronic nickname in world cricket, replies, "Why only me? You pack your bags too. Bye-bye." Then the captain of the Indian cricket team and his vice-captain giggle at their own private joke like a pair of schoolboys.

It was not merely a nicely staged bit of image-building during what's been an endless examination of the strength and cohesiveness of the Indian team's current decision-making unit. This after all is the tour during which Ganguly felt it necessary to have Dravid by his side to tell the travelling press pack that all was well between them, despite reports to the contrary coming from India. A few days later former board president Raj Singh Dungarpur walks up to Dravid in Kandy and tells him, within earshot of a junior teammate, to "be ready" to be captain. A coup was being not-so-subtly planned but Dungarpur got his target wrong. The captain and his deputy have formed a partnership as unlikely as that of a trapeze artist and a mathematician. But critically, it is as strong as Rodgers & Hammerstein or (since the adventures of their team often resemble an improbable Hindi film) at least Salim-Javed. There's no monster hit yet but it's there somewhere in the destinies of these two cricketers whose careers have run on parallel but are also inextricably intertwined tracks . With their rapid rise to seniority in a very raw Indian side, the Dravid-Ganguly association has grown deeper.

Think back to the dying moments of the home series against Australia. Harbhajan Singh hits the winning runs, Ganguly jumps off his chair in joy and then first thing, looks for his deputy and leaps into his arms. In Kandy, Dravid tells the hounded and hopelessly out-of-form Ganguly again and again, "You're always one afternoon away from greatness." It becomes Ganguly's life-raft, his mantra and when the time comes to stem the storm, he has Dravid at the other end. Chasing 264 to square the series, even as the merchants of doom predict surrender, Dravid scores 75 and the Bengal left-hander his first fifty in 14 innings. They fashion another turnaround victory and the beleaguered Ganguly finds himself in the company of the disdainful Pataudi and Bishen Bedi as the only Indian captain to win three Tests away from home. If in another couple of seasons, should Ganguly and Dravid look back at Sri Lanka 2001, they may well discover that this was the tour where they came of age as leaders of what is turning out to be a brave new team.

Despite the greatest respect both men have for him, the shadow of Sachin Tendulkar has been a substantial one. It has both dominated and shielded them. With Tendulkar absent due to injury, the shadow was gone and so was the shelter. They could have been blinded by the sudden light but have not. They could have let respect atrophy into over-reliance but chose another path instead. What they did was pass the old tea-bag test. People, it's said, are like tea bags-you don't know how strong they are until you put them in hot water. In Sri Lanka, things were boiling. The first Test was gone inside four days and that was the time all the bad old Indian habits could have resurfaced. First to go was harmony, rapidly followed by self-belief and the seepage of that old toxin, total indifference. The team even had the excuse: in the Test series they were not only without Tendulkar but the side's most experienced bowlers, Srinath and Kumble, and two of their most successful players of this year, V.V.S. Laxman and Ashish Nehra. Ganguly was asking travelling journalists whether they had brought their whites and manager Anand Mate, well into his fifties, was heading for the hotel gym every day.

Up 1-0, the Sri Lankans admitted that they thought they had knocked most of the fight out of India. "You would think that without Tendulkar, you had a good chance, specially after going 1-0 up and that it would put a little bit more pressure on Ganguly and Dravid," captain Sanath Jayasuriya told India Today.

For the Indians, it is the fightback rather than the final outcome of the Test series that is more important. It has proved at least a few things: that the team has leaders who are not afraid of leading. "I don't think you know what you can do unless the responsibility actually lands on you," says Dravid. It has crash-landed and Ganguly and Dravid, backed by coach John Wright, have become better at picking up the pieces and assembling a coherent whole.

When one-Test veteran Mohammed Kaif batted on the grassy practice wickets in Galle in a blaze of flashy shotmaking, Dravid was quick to go over to the nets and advise him that playing on seaming tracks meant being watchful and choosy about which ball to hit. Deep in his own batting gloom, Ganguly took aside paceman Zaheer Khan and, with Dravid, sat him down before the second Test. Khan who had been caned by Jayasuriya in the first Test told India Today, "They showed the kind of confidence that makes a world of difference to a player just starting out. They told me that I had great ability and that no one could play me if I was doing things right. That wickets were mine to take." Khan and Venkatesh Prasad opened the doors for the Indian win in Kandy with a burst on the third morning that wrecked the Lankans.

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