He quit, didn’t he?

There should be nothing surprising about Greg Chappell’s formal announcement that he no longer wishes to continue as coach of the Indian cricket team. He has had to tussle too hard, and too often without relief, to get the team he thought would be more forward-looking. A master of targeted leaks himself, he has had to suffer the disciplinary outrage of his charges questioning his motivation through media reports. Chappell can bowl underarm when the rules so allow it, but anyone even remotely aware of his long career would have known that he would not submit to a public trial. Only the composition and experience of the India XI in the coming months will prove how beneficial or detrimental Chappell’s stint with the team has been. But his exit is not an isolated development. It comes amidst some of the ugliest and most ungainly moves by our cricketers and spectators. And by preferring to act decisively — even it means just absenting himself from the team’s future — Chappell has pushed key actors to be measured against the game’s standards.

In fact, Chappell has done service by ending his tenure with India. It should at least put a stop to the petty post-mortems ordinary decisions are being dragged through. Did he want India to field or bat first against Bangladesh? Does it matter, because on ranking shouldn’t India have won anyway? The point of revisiting the World Cup is not to settle micro issues. It is to shed the deadwood — strategies and persons — and look to the future. Chappell’s exit must thus alter the debate. Because it’s not just Chappell who’d have found it difficult to be accommodated in a forward-looking team. It would have been difficult because he failed to bring the one quality from his Australian cricketing culture that India so needed: to find an inner standard that tells a cricketer when is the right time to go, forever or temporarily.

A new Indian team needs to coalesce around one principle and this cannot happen with players and officials in possession of old feats and old loyalties. There must be only one criterion for a person’s selection: can he help India improve? It’s Chappell’s contribution that he at least brought this question into the debate, even if he couldn’t settle it.