Cracking the complex code called captaincy in the IPL

Cricket captaincy vs leadership, IPL 2024 highlights, Shreyas Iyer's success, and challenges faced by first-time skippers.

Cricket is the only major team sport where the captain doesn’t sport an armband. It’s also the only sport where having (capt) against one’s name entails greater responsibility than merely turning up for the spin of coin and deciding whether to attack or receive, and which is the favoured end at the start of a contest.

Then again, there is captaincy, and there is leadership. Captaincy loosely translates to being on top of the game cricket-wise, in terms of understanding the conditions and the opposition, working out strategies, zeroing in on field placements, making bowling changes, sometimes revisiting the batting order to address the demands of the situation. Leadership is more far-arching, encompassing various non-sporting elements including but not limited to calmness under pressure, the propensity to lift the spirits of when things go south, and motivational and man-management skills which recognise that there is no one size that fits all.

Captaincy and leadership can’t, and shouldn’t, be mutually exclusive, but not all captains make good leaders. There are plenty of ‘fair-weather’ skippers whose outlook is bright and sunny when everything pans out according to plan, but who slip into lackadaisical indifference when plans come unstuck for one reason or the other. To be on top of one’s leadership game when doing the front-running is natural and uncomplicated; it’s adversity that tests the true mettle of a leader because it’s in a crisis that the rest look up to you for inspiration and encouragement.

Before IPL 2024, few had pigeon-holed Shreyas Iyer as the perfect amalgam of captaincy nous and leadership skills and yet here he is now, only the eighth skipper in the tournament’s 17-year existence to lift the trophy. Shreyas ran an excellent campaign; there will be whispers that he was only doing the bidding of the team mentor (Gautam Gambhir) and the head coach (Chandrakant Pandit) and there will be an element of truth to that. After all, especially in T20 cricket, the coach becomes cricket’s equivalent of a footballing manager whose lot it is to draw up game-plans and alternative game-plans. The fast pace at which the action unfolds sometimes calls for a dispassionate, outsider view and that’s what the back-room staff sitting on the sidelines often provides, but no matter what, the buck stops with the captain.

Some coaches, like Ashish Nehra, are firm believers in sending out explicit instructions, which not even a first-time skipper like Shubman Gill would have enjoyed. We are talking about international players, not 15- or 17-year-old kids who might require hand-holding in the nascent stages of their captaincy journey. There is something to be said for constant outside interference and suggestions/tips/orders that might be in direct conflict with the designated captain’s thinking, but that’s the direction in which T20 cricket, especially, might head going forward, what with data and analytics becoming as integral a tool in preparation as range-hitting and adding variations to one’s bowling repertoire.

Shreyas impressed with his composure and his poise under pressure, though truth to tell, Kolkata Knight Riders was seldom put under serious sustained pressure during most of IPL 2024. KKR lost just three of 14 matches – two of their fixtures were abandoned without a ball being bowled – and were an extraordinary force in the final week of the competition when they schooled Sunrisers Hyderabad twice in six nights. It might be tempting to point out that, given the resources at his disposal, Shreyas didn’t have the most challenging of tasks. After all, he had a gun opening combine in the blazing duo of Phil Salt and Sunil Narine, a charged-up No. 3 in Venkatesh Iyer, and a versatile, skilled, balanced bowling group with Mitchell Starc and Varun Chakravarthy at the forefront. But how often have we not seen a team packed to the gills with proven performers come unstuck in the heat of battle? How can captaincy not be a factor when a team runs as dominant a campaign as KKR did, brushing aside all-comers with the confidence and assurance of an outfit that knows that when it is purring along, it is well-nigh invincible?

Shreyas and Pat Cummins, a first-time IPL captain with Sunrisers Hyderabad, caught the eye the most and not necessarily because their teams finished 1-2. But unlike his KKR counterpart, Cummins is no stranger to captaincy, or leadership, having led Australia to the World Test Championship and 50-over World Cup titles in the last 12 months. That being said, leading a franchise brings vastly magnified and varied challenges compared to captaining a national side. By his own admission, Cummins didn’t know anything at the start of the tournament about many of the players that comprised the SRH family. It is to his great credit that he walked the extra mile to not just get to know their names and put faces to those names, but also to get to know them in the real sense in the limited time available, thereby nurturing a climate of trust and faith that manifested itself in exciting, exhilarating cricket.