Wives are easy targets, they distract from the real failings

At the turn of the century, England cricketer Darren Gough said that international cricket had become a single man’s game. Since then tours may have got shorter, but tournaments have increased, and careers have expanded. The work-life balance remains skewed. To rephrase something an Indian CEO said recently, how long can you stare at a cricket bat on a weekend?

Sport and family life have an uneasy relationship. ‘Cricket widow’ is part of the game’s lexicon. As the sport makes greater demands on players, enlightened administrators permit a semblance of family life while on tour.

Gambhir’s view

Indian coach Gautam Gambhir has conveyed to the Board of Control for Cricket in India that the presence of wives on tour was a reason for the poor showing in Australia.

This is an effective way of taking the attention away from his own failures and focussing it on easy targets. From all accounts, a happy dressing room of recent years became an unhappy one. The major change was the new coach. Do the math.

Blaming the wife and kids for team failures reeks of toxic patriarchy. Had India won in Australia, would the wives have been given any credit?

I remember being greeted by players and media on a tour of England where Virat Kohli was struggling, with the words (spoken in a conspiratorial whisper): “You know he’s got his girlfriend with him,….” As if that explained a weakness outside the off stump. Yet when he made runs in Australia and elsewhere and the same lady, his wife now, was with him, no one said, “It’s because his wife is here.” Players are adults and professionals and it helps to treat them thus.

Misplaced blame

There are enough cricketing reasons for India’s loss — discussed in earlier columns here — including better cricket by the hosts. To blame the families is convenient. Also old-fashioned. Three decades ago, manager Ray Illingworth blamed England’s loss in South Africa on the presence of families. His contemporary, the great wicketkeeper Alan Knott has said, “I have played my best cricket when I have been with my wife.”

Both sportsmen and cricket boards have since become more enlightened. South Africa’s coach Bob Woolmer organised shopping and sightseeing trips for wives on tour because, as he told Wisden, “Players didn’t have to worry about whether the wife was being looked after or not and could get on with playing cricket. You’d then meet up in the evening for supper like couples leading normal lives.”

The key word here is ‘normal’. The attempt was to make things as recognisably routine as possible so players stayed relaxed.

Given the loneliness and frustration that are part of touring, some husbands stray, and family life is sacrificed at the altar of sport. Reporters who tour with the Indian team know about players’ peccadilloes. Mohammad Azharuddin’s marriage collapsed while Sourav Ganguly’s nearly did when he was photographed at a temple ceremony.

Of course such things might have happened anyway. And you could argue that it is not the cricket board’s job to foster relationships. But a happy player without marital problems is clearly the more effective player. Boards the world over recognise this. Which is why players are given paternity leave to be at the birth of their children like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli were during recent tours.

This is a cultural change in Indian cricket. In the mid-70s, when Sunil Gavaskar was playing in the West Indies his son Rohan was born. Paternity leave was an alien concept then, and Gavaskar didn’t ask for it.

Long absences affect every member of the family. Players have written about the pain of their young kids not recognising them on return from a tour or, in Phil Tuffnell’s case, receiving him at the airport with a “goodbye daddy”!

“You know what you signed up for” — implied in the (written) contract between player and board or the (unwritten) one between player and family — is never a consolation.

“When I’m out on the pitch with the Australian team, I don’t see them as men in the middle of a cricket match but as men in the middle of their lives,” wrote skipper Pat Cummins. It is an attitude cricket boards, especially the BCCI can learn from.