Date : 7/12/09
That John Buchanan, the former coach of the Australian national team and the Knight Riders IPL squad, had a troubled relationship with Sourav Ganguly and Shane Warne is no secret.
What comes as a revelation, though, are the swipes he has taken at Sunil Gavaskar, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Kevin Pietersen, Shoaib Akhtar, Vijay Mallya and Mark Ramprakash in his just-released book, 'The Future of Cricket: The Rise of Twenty20'.
The book deals with IPL and T20. Yet, it is much more likely that attention will be focused on its criticism of some of cricket's biggest stars.
The swipe at Gavaskar comes while Buchanan is talking about a franchisee meeting with IPL bosses in Goa in February this year. When he suggested that more international players be allowed to figure in the playing XI, Buchanan claims, the IPL administrators decided to refer the concept to the technical committee headed by Gavaskar. "What this means is that any ideas that affect the way T20 might be played are referred to a committee chaired by a person who is blinkered by bias and tradition," the former Aussie coach concludes.
Buchanan has taken a swipe at several Indian cricketers but has also had a few good words to say about former Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly in his just released book.
In the course of a chapter on Ganguly, in which he sometimes freely praises the former Indian skipper and even hands out left-handed compliments while maintaining that he is unsuitable for T20, he talks of Ganguly as "the model for the new breed of confident and combative Indian cricketers" akin to Ian Chappell for the Aussies.
However, Buchanan goes on to take a dig at dashing southpaw Yuvraj Singh while comparing him with Ganguly."Yuvraj Singh in a sense tries to be a modern-day Ganguly, but I don't think he has the charisma or the dignity with which Ganguly carries himself". He is quick to clarify that he is not saying Yuvraj has no charisma or dignity, but the damage already done is compounded by adding that the Mohali team coach Tom Moody had told him "Yuvraj would just walk off after training, leaving all his gear and rubbish because he was used to someone else picking up after him".
As for Bhajji, he talks of how the Indian offie is "good at dishing out treatment, lighting the fire, and then finding an appropriate means to camouflage his action".
Talking of the Bhajji-Andrew Symonds showdown during the Test series in Australia in 2007-08, Buchanan says of Harbhajan, "in that instance he dished it out, but when it came to his turn he was not able to receive it back so well".
Yet, says Buchanan, there was no hint of Pietersen suggesting that players were being paid "obscene or over-inflated" sums or of any social responsibility in "dispersing or donating or sponsoring some of those friends who he said he knew were 'doing it tough'." All this in a chapter entitled The Chase for Cash.
There's a chapter entitled The Shock of Shoaib, where Buchanan writes about how another former Aussie coach, Greg Chappell had warned him before the first IPL season: "He (Ganguly) won't be your biggest problem...Shoaib will...He will make Warney (Shane Warne) look like a highly disciplined fitness fanatic in comparison." For sheer economy of effort - three people swiped at in one short passage - that one takes the cake.
