Did Sourav Ganguly try to play the victim card under Mithali Raj's shadow?

Sourav Ganguly was one of the earliest to respond to the Indian Women’s team’s decision to drop Mithali Raj from the crucial semi-final against England in the Women’s World T20. Former cricketers and experts responded as the layers have unveiled in the last couple of days with indirect allegations and clarifications from coach Ramesh Powar and Mithali. However, unlike the others, Ganguly didn’t take any sides.

Instead, the former Indian captain compared his position in the Indian team during 2005-2006 with Mithali being dropped. “The best in the world are at times show the door. When I saw Mithali Raj being dropped, I said ‘Welcome to the group’,” said Ganguly.

The former Indian captain evoked ghosts of the past from his tenure under Greg Chappell where he ended up losing his spot as a player. “Captains are asked to sit, so just do it. I have also sat out in the dugout after captaining India. I have done it in Faisalabad,” he further added.

A new meaning to “Peak”!

Ganguly’s reactions on the matter sounded more like someone trying to play the victim card for his own exclusion. It is a well-known fact that Sourav was going through a lean patch and also had issues with Greg that resulted in Rahul Dravid‘s promotion as the new Indian skipper. Similarly, Mithali, due to her low S/R in the T20I format and reportedly her issues with the coach was benched from the key semi-final.

Mithali scored two fifties against Pakistan and Ireland in the WT20 this month and was player of the match in both the games. But it was her intent in both the games that prevented her from taking the field in the big match. On the other hand, Ganguly had more words than facts about his performances. The former Indian captain claimed to have been dropped at his “peak”.

Numbers don’t lie:

“I didn’t play an ODI game for 15 months when I was probably the best performer in one-day cricket,” said Ganguly with regards to being dropped from the ODI squad after the 2005 Tri-Series in Zimbabwe. There is no doubt that ODI format was best suited to his game as he piled on records until the 2003 World Cup. His numbers started to decline since he became the Indian captain and it turned worse after the 2003 CWC in Africa where he led India to the final.

Starting April 2003 to September 2005, Ganguly batted in 49 innings scoring 1403 runs in ODI cricket. He scored ten fifties and failed to convert any of those into a triple-digit score. He scored those runs at an average of 30.42 and a strike-rate of 68.67. Ganguly, who claimed that he was the best performer in this format at that time, was the second-worst batsman in terms of numbers.

Among the 39 players who scored 1000 ODI runs in this period, only Zimbabwe’s Tatenda Taibu had a lower average and S/R than Ganguly. The southpaw made a comeback to the ODI squad at the start of 2007 mostly due to his reputation heading into the World Cup in the Caribbean.

He struck three fifties across ten List A matches he played in India in those 15 months scoring 328 runs at an average of 36.44 and a strike rate of 65.34. Ganguly also made a reference to being benched for the Faisalabad Test on the 2006 tour of Pakistan.

Going into the series, only seven players aggregated 500 Test runs for India in 25 months. Among those, Ganguly’s average of 38.54 is the 3rd lowest behind Irfan Pathan (26.71) and Gautam Gambhir (36.00). The price of Kolkata scored only two tons across 25 innings in this span; one in December 2003 in the Brisbane Test and one in September 2005 during the Zimbabwe tour which was his last as the captain of India.

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