Celebrating Riyan Parag: A cricketer who dares to be different

Indian cricket hasn’t had the best of relationships with players who have dared to be different. Vinod Kambli is, perhaps, the most telling example of this – one who liked to have a good time off the pitch while he was incredibly good at what he was supposed to do: playing cricket. However, his flamboyance, as his coach and one of the greatest to have honed cricketers in the country, the late Ramakant Achrekar, put it, rubbed people the wrong way.

Once the impression was formed, Kambli found it difficult to shed and despite the nine comebacks, he played merely 17 Tests, which was a price he paid for being who he was – different from others. It would be difficult to imagine if the legendary Shane Warne, a ‘different’ cricketer in his own right, would have achieved the same things he did if he was playing for the Indian cricket team, for his flamboyance might have been a tad bit difficult to digest.

Indian cricket has an easy relationship with cricketers who mind their own business. However, you bring in a Ravi Shastri – whose glittering cricketing achievements as a player and a coach are certainly up there with some of the best Indian cricket has seen, but who receives a fair amount of criticism from time to time for the way he is – he is different from the expected norm a cricketer in India is supposed to follow.

Shastri is outspoken; likes to enjoy his life, and that, not his cricketing achievements, draws eyeballs and criticism. If a footballing analogy can be brought into the argument, let’s just say that Indian cricket has a problem adjusting to a Jose Mourinho but is fairly comfortable with a Sir Bobby Robson.

It seems now, however, with Sourav Ganguly at the helm, who has experience of handling fairly well such ‘different’ cricketers during his tenure as the captain, that the things have improved, as evidenced by the successful reintegration of KL Rahul and Hardik Pandya into the Indian team.

However, for the fans, at least for some of them, the different characters are difficult to get attuned to. For them, there is still the same old template to follow to be the ideal cricketer – be docile on the field while off the field there should be no/bare minimum social media activity. Deviate from this narrative and things get tricky, moderated by how good your form is – the worse it is, much more likely that you will be criticised.

Take, for example, Pandya, who is currently being universally praised for his captaincy after the 2022 IPL. Shreevats Goswami, who played for Sunrisers Hyderabad last season, called out the hypocrisy with a tweet, drawing attention to how the player has been criticised countless times before for his dressing style or his confidence. Virat Kohli, too, faced it in his earlier days – for the tattoos and his aggressive demeanor. When with the same attributes, he propelled himself to become the best batter in the game, it was all counted as a positive, much like it is happening with Pandya right now.

It all points to one thing: each player has his own journey to the top. There isn’t a fixed mould, contrary to popular perception, that guarantees success in the sport. The problem is not that oftentimes people consider someone like Rahul Dravid as the ideal cricketer, the problem is that they shut themselves off from the idea that people are different, they can be different. Many have perished in this clamor for uniformity, for they lacked the self-belief, clarity, and resilience that the likes of Kohli, Pandya, or Shastri had in themselves.

The current one on the radar is the 20-year-old Riyan Parag. He has shown the promise and given his seemingly playful nature, whenever the chips were going to be down, him being the target was a foregone conclusion.

Cricket, as Dwayne Bravo once told Sompal Kami, the Nepali cricketer who shared the dressing room with him during the Canada T20 league, is all about self-belief more than anything else. As long as Parag is comfortable with himself, as the successful players before him have been, the results are bound to follow – sooner or later – just as they did with the Gujarat Titans captain. Doubting himself and changing in the aftermath of outside opinion, however, will be disastrous, as it happened with a young Graeme Hick when the Englishman began doubting himself and his technique following criticism by a section, despite the same having fetched him countless runs in the county circuit.