Why BCCI’s restrictions on family members, private travel is a positive step for Indian cricket

Review meetings aren’t commonplace in Indian cricket. There are roadmap meetings, to chalk out long-term plans, outline visions and arrive at pathways towards the pursuit of excellence. But not too many ‘review meetings’ – post-mortems, if you like.

Perhaps the most (in)famous review meeting in recent memory took place in Mumbai in September 2005, immediately after India returned from Zimbabwe, and culminated in Sourav Ganguly being stripped of the captaincy after a public and unsavoury fallout with then-coach Greg Chappell. The latest such endeavour, in an upscale south Mumbai hotel last weekend, is unlikely to spark a similar dramatic outcome, though several significant thoughts, among them restricting ‘family time’ for players on tours, were tossed around.

BCCI cracks the whip on Team India

It has emerged that the Board of Control for Cricket in India is seriously contemplating going back in time to restrict the duration of families travelling with players to two weeks if a tour is of 45 days or more, and to a week for trips of shorter lengths. This might appear a knee-jerk reaction to the 1-3 loss in Australia, which translated to the Border-Gavaskar Trophy passing hands, though in reality, it is going back to a convention that existed before the onset of Covid-19 and the restrictions in its wake that made it almost mandatory for families that could to travel and ease much of the mental tedium.

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Is going back in time a retrograde step? Should performers in a high-pressure environment be deprived of home comforts, of being with their spouses/partners and kids, of seeking a release that no one else can offer, no matter how much of an extended family a cricket team is? Is it forcing them to deliver with one hand tied behind their backs?

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There are no right answers to these questions. Even amongst the players and the support staff, there will be different points of view. Perhaps this topic wouldn’t even have cropped up had the results panned out otherwise, had India been on the winning side. But that isn’t the case and so here we are, at a critical juncture with the need for course correction swift and immediate.

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There are multiple arguments for having families on tour without any restriction on how long they can stay on, just as there will be counters. One of the many and huge positives of travelling families is peace of mind and an off-field distraction that facilitates the switching off process, especially after an ordinary day in the park.

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But there is the question of camaraderie and togetherness and spirit and bonding. One isn’t saying that the presence of families will organically hamper this process, but it is inevitable that when one has their wife and kid(s) waiting for them in the hotel room, the temptation to get away from colleagues with whom one spends nearly 12 hours on match days can be irresistible.

The importance of traveling together as a team

The passage of time and the riches that have flooded the BCCI coffers mean that even at the age-group level, teams hardly embark on train journeys unless it is inevitable. Rahul Dravid, for instance, has spoken often and with great fondness of the time spent on trains while going from one venue to another for Ranji Trophy games and having the opportunity to listen to a GR Vishwanath talk about cricket of an era gone by. ‘Vishy’ never spoke about himself, because his modesty wouldn’t allow him to, but he opened the youngsters’ eyes to cricket as it existed in the 1970s and ‘80s, enriching their education and providing a roadmap for the future.

Just imagine a Nitish Kumar Reddy or a Harshit Rana receiving similar guidance or just being in the privileged position of going out for a meal with Virat Kohli and/or Jasprit Bumrah? True, there is much to be learnt by merely being watchful around the dressing room, but the value of an interpersonal interaction can never be exaggerated. Kohli himself, when he was captain in England in 2018, took mid-series arrivals Hanuma Vihari and Rishabh Pant out for a meal not long after they landed halfway through the Tests, a gesture that wasn’t lost on the two young men. This may not be possible if one’s focus is divided, as is inevitable when near ones are waiting for your company and attention.

Cricketers spend so much time with one another that sometimes, they just want to get away from it all and that’s understandable. But it can’t be that after a day’s play, everyone is left to his own devices, only to reassemble before the bus leaves the hotel for the ground the next morning. What will it do to foster oneness? How can that be a team in the truest sense of the word? There must be a proper balance between addressing the two families, and it’s a tricky balance to find, hence perhaps this latest pondering.

There isn’t, and can’t be, a universal, templated blueprint on how this delicate issue can be handled. Some teams have tasted great success when partners have officially been banned on tours, such as Brazil during the 2019 Copa America. Others have resented such scriptures, turning on officialdom and occasionally on each other. There is a school of thought that a blanket edict might not be the best way out, but there has to be some standardisation so that it doesn’t appear as if there are different rules for different folks. The role of the leadership group – the captain and the coach, in a cricket team – therefore comes into stark focus because not only must they be equally fair to everyone concerned, they must also be seen to be equally fair.

A scattered Indian camp Down Under

Much has been said about how the Indians didn’t get together as a team to celebrate their victory in the Perth Test. There is great merit in a team dinner – it emerges that during their near-two-month tryst with Australia, there was only one of those in the Indian camp. Contrastingly, after the Sydney triumph, the Australian players huddled together in their changing room for hours on end, only leaving the SCG by 9.00 pm, more than six and a half hours after Beau Webster had hammered the winning boundary. That is not the only way to commemorate the result, admittedly, but it certainly is one way and it’s a way India too had embraced until not very long back.

On any tour, a team must stay and travel as a team and that wasn’t the case in Australia, with not everyone travelling on the same flight from one city to another, and not because tickets weren’t available. It just isn’t a good look, even if the reasons for jetting off separately with one’s family are perfectly valid and justified. A two-hour air trip can, after all, be as enriching as the multi-hour train journeys Dravid relished, feeding off Vishy’s wisdom and sagacity.

Oh, and just in case anyone thinks one is suggesting that having families on tour doesn’t breed success, think again. All one is suggesting is striking a balance – not easy, of course, when the ‘right’ balance varies from one individual to another.