 "Hardik Pandya faced the full wrath of the Motera crowd in his first appearance at the Narendra Modi Stadium since his high-profile trade to Mumbai Indians from Gujarat Titans in November. AP")
Former India coach Ravi Shastri believes the fan backlash towards Hardik Pandya could have been minimised had Mumbai Indians shown “clarity in communication” while announcing him as captain. Pandya joined MI during the pre-season from Gujarat Titans and subsequently replaced Rohit Sharma as skipper .
Shastri advised Pandya to stay calm and weather the storm with his performance to bring fans around. So far, that hasn’t worked out well for Pandya or the Mumbai Indians. MI have suffered three straight defeats to start the season and occupy the bottom spot in IPL points table .
Pandya, meanwhile, has seen severe hostility from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. Fans have booed Pandya and chanted Rohit Sharma’s name .
“This is not the Indian cricket team that’s playing. This is franchise cricket. They have paid top dollar. They’re the bosses. It’s their entitlement as to who they want as captain,” said Shastri on Star Sports.
“Okay, where I think this could have been handled better was with more clarity in communication. If you wanted Hardik Pandya as captain, then say that we are looking at the future. We are looking to build. Rohit has done a fabulous job, as everyone knows, and we want him to help out Hardik in these next three years as the team progresses. That communication, that clarity should have come out a little more for all this to die down. So it’s not a case of you saying, ‘No, we don’t want Rohit Sharma,’ or ‘He was treated badly,’ and all the things that are coming out in social media.
“There’s a lot of bull crap out there as well. You know, and some of the stories are just planted. A lot of it is just planted on other people’s names, including my name.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“So my advice to Hardik would be to be calm, patient, ignore, and just focus on your game. Get a couple of performances going. Mumbai Indians is a terrific side. If they get on a roll, they win three or four matches on the trot, everything will subside. At the end of the day, nothing beats results. You win matches, and things will change,” suggested the former India cricketer.
Former Australia batter Matthew Hayden said he understood fans’ affection for Rohit who led the team for 11 seasons and took them to five IPL titles.
“See the fans are the biggest stakeholders in this and they often don’t have the politics, the insights, but they want to understand this, they love Rohit Sharma. There’s going to be no getting around that. So potentially how it could have been handled little bit differently is to ensure that Rohit is on board with it, the franchise is communicating it out to the fans, through social media platforms that announce a lot of these things and they actually carry a lot of weight,” he said on the show.
“You got to have a succession plan and you’ve seen the same thing with CSK last season didn’t we, when Jaddu came into captaincy and it didn’t quite work for them so maybe there is an opportunity to reassess, there are some concerns in and around Hardik’s leadership but I think it’s grossly unfair to look at the start of the season which is notoriously slow for the Mumbai Indians , and judge one of the iconic cricketers in India and will be for a long time to come as well, subject to his own fitness which is always vulnerable being an all-rounder as he is.
“But it’s grossly unfair to misjudge his performances so far, and the team’s performances and then speculate around what is and what isn’t happening inside that changing room which we don’t know,” he added.
MI will next get an opportunity to pick up their first win of the season when they take on Delhi Capitals at the Wankhede Stadium on 7 April.