ON A STICKY WICKET: Rahul Dravid (left) and Chappell

If blogs are a gauge of public mood, the Indian cricket coach had better watch out. The Internet was abuzz with discussion earlier this week on whether Team India needs a drastic overhaul after its recent on-field disasters. Postings in cricketnext.com’s message board, the blog of an Indian television network, have virtually skinned Greg Chappell alive. Critical of his handling of the team, most bloggers call for his ouster, and many are rude and derisive. “Sack Greg Chappell,” screams a blogger in a posting, for Chappell has done little for the Indian team apart from turning Rahul Dravid into a “puppet” captain. Critics hold that even the standard of fielding, despite Chappell’s oft-repeated stress on it, is on the decline. Another blogger suggests that Chappell be shifted to coach players who are under 19 years so that he could practise his “experiments” on them.

Clearly, Chappell, the legendary Australian batsman who scored 7,110 runs in 87 Test matches that he played in his 18-year-long cricket career, is under a blistering attack. But he is not the only one to have been singed in the red-hot heat of cricket. Clamours for the heads of Bob Woolmer and Duncan Fletcher, Chappell’s counterparts in Pakistan and England, have surfaced too. If former Pakistan captain Imran Khan, backed by the likes of Javed Miandad, has publicly called for Woolmer’s ouster, legendary English batsman Geoffrey Boycott feels Fletcher is past his sell-by date.

How time changes and fortune tumbles! Not so long ago, the cricketing world was eulogising these very men who share quite a few traits. All born in 1948, the three were foreigners roped in to coach a team. Fletcher, originally a Zimbabwean player, won British citizenship only in September 2005 — six years after he started coaching England.

Just months ago, they were being credited with “revolutionising” the game. And not without reason. Chappell turned around the Indian team and helped log its first Series win in the Caribbean in more than three decades. A proud nation sang paeans to the new coach, who was even feted as a “management guru” of sorts for team building, and was invited to speak to the executives of Hindustan Lever Limited.

Then there was Fletcher, who was nothing short of a hero when England bagged The Ashes under his watch in 2005. And the Pakistanis were overjoyed when Woolmer scripted his team’s impressive victories against England and India early this year.

But that was then. Now, as sweet triumphs morph into bitter defeats, bouquets are drying up, replaced increasingly with thudding brickbats. The coaches are being strafed, somewhat unfairly, for everything going wrong with their teams.

That, possibly, is the unscripted rule of the game. As a former Indian player puts it, a coach has to “take the blame” for failures when he “gets all the kudos” for things that go right. And needless to say, all three coaches are at the moment floundering in some way or the other.

Ironically, Chappell is now being vilified for what was essentially his triumph card — creating a flexible batting order in the Indian team. He rotated batsmen, switching their usual batting positions. If Irfan Pathan was brought up in some matches to bat in the number three position, Dravid, who usually held that crucial slot, was pushed down in the batting order. In some matches, Dravid was zoomed up to open for India while Virender Sehwag, the usual opener, was placed in the middle order. According to officials at the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), Chappell’s employer, the idea behind the move was to reduce dependence on any particular player and create an adequate backup for the team.

Chappell’s detractors say the experiment has, however, played havoc with the Indian team, destroying the established batting order and causing widespread confusion. The result, they say, is that Team India is now, uncontrollably, hurtling downhill, seemingly on a losing streak. After performing miserably in the Malaysian Tri-Series, the Indian cricket team failed to make it to the semi-final of the International Cricket Council’s Champions Trophy on its home turf last month.

“He has messed it up completely,” says former Test player Ashok Malhotra, who was a national selector. When Chappell came in as coach in mid-2005, Malhotra points out that everyone in the team knew his batting order. “But now, even the captain, who should be secure about his batting order, doesn’t know what it is,” says Malhotra, who was the last Indian coach of the national team before John Wright took over in 2003.

Cricket analysts, too, find the frequent changes in the batting order incomprehensible. “One of the puzzling things about India is the way they have mucked up the batting order,” says Mihir Bose, sports editor of the London-based Daily Telegraph and author of the book A Maiden View: The Magic of Indian Cricket.

Ripples of murmurs also float through the country’s cricketing establishment about the decisions to keep able spinners away from the team. “Traditionally, our strength has been our spin bowlers, but world-class spinners such as Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble were not put to use as Chappell laid stress on the four medium pacers we have, who are anything but world class,” says a former national player, requesting anonymity.

Former Indian captain Dilip Vengsarkar, now chairman of the national selection committee, wouldn’t comment on Chappell or his decisions as he is “now part of the cricket establishment” but his recent decision to include both Kumble and Singh in the forthcoming trip to South Africa signals a change in view in the BCCI and a veiled snub to Chappell and his one-time backer, Kiran More, whom Vengsarkar has replaced as chief selector. “A great IIM professor cannot always be a great CEO. Similarly, a great player cannot always be a great coach,” says Malhotra.

Chappell, certainly, doesn’t look at things that way. To him, the outcome is less important than the process. “People who judge our progress on just wins and losses are probably going to make a lot of critical comments that may not be totally correct in the sense that the game is not just about winning and losing but getting better in critical areas,” Chappell notes. And he says he not only takes the failures in his stride but also learns from them. “I believe it is important to understand that there is failure. You fail more often than succeed. And if you cannot deal with failure you are probably not going to survive. The only way you learn is through experience, including the experience of failure,” the coach says.

The rumbling of discontent with coaches can be heard in Pakistan and England as well. For Pakistan’s poor showing in the Champions Trophy, former captain Imran Khan squarely blames coach Woolmer and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), which hired him in 2004. “It was all because of the failed strategy on the part of the coach and the PCB that our team’s performance had been dismal during the ICC Champions Trophy,” Khan says. While two fast bowlers, Shoaib Akhtar and Muhammad Asif, were banned and recalled on doping charges, the former pacer says another fast bowler and Danish Kaneria had not been taken to India to play the trophy.

“Whatever we have seen on the country’s cricketing front simply shows an ad hoc approach and nothing else,” Khan notes, questioning the Kanpur-born Woolmer’s “credentials” as a former Test player and now a coach.

Others question the very decision to bring a foreign coach to Pakistan. “It’s very difficult for a foreign coach to understand our requirements and therein lies the genesis of the current poor performance of Pakistan’s cricket team,” says Javed Miandad, former Pakistan captain and coach, now highly critical of Woolmer’s coaching ability. Miandad says foreign coaches claim to bring with them “new and attractive” theories, which “nobody acknowledges in their own countries but in India and Pakistan they are admired and considered as salvagers.”

To cure the malady afflicting Pakistan’s team, Miandad, like Imran Khan, calls for recruiting local coaches. “I can even recommend a name to the PCB. They should try Aquib Javed, who is a very senior cricketer and earned a lot of respect for the country during his career as a fast bowler,” Khan ventures.

Where Fletcher is concerned, Geoffrey Boycott says, in a much-talked-about article in a London paper, that it’s time for him to go as he has “reached the end of his shelf-life”. And he stresses that the job of a coach comes with a shelf-life. Referring to England’s dismal showing in the recent one-day internationals (ODIs), the former batsman concedes that Fletcher is “not a terrible” coach and says he has done a good job of reviving England’s Test competitiveness. “But after a while, I believe a coach runs out of new ideas and the players get comfortable and complacent with him. He almost becomes too familiar and the players stop listening,” Boycott notes.

Many in England agree. “There is no question that Fletcher has failed where ODIs are concerned although he has revitalised England’s Test team, now one of the best in the world,” Bose of the Daily Telegraph says. He agrees with Boycott that coaches are useful for limited periods. “No coach can go on forever. There is a limit to how many times you can reinvent a team,” Bose, tipped to be the BBC’s first sports editor, says.

(From left) Fletcher with Matthew Maynard and Andrew Flintoff; (above) Woolmer

But should the coach be the only one to be panned when players under him fail to deliver? Not really, say those involved in the game. In any case, the contributions of all the three coaches are too valuable to be ignored completely. In the words of a BCCI vice-president, Chappell has taken the players out of their comfort zone, his public spat with former Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly notwithstanding. “The boys are now much fitter, more athletic and more agile on the field than ever before,” the BCCI official notes. As coach Chappell, too, says that his single most achievement is “changing the attitudes” of Indian players.

And not everyone is looking askance at Chappell’s style of functioning. Cricket commentator Kishore Bhimani says his style is typically Australian. “They drop and change players at the drop of a hat. They tend to be autocratic and dictatorial whereas we Indians are easy-going, sentimental and cling to the past. So when you invite an Australian to come to coach you, you have got to be prepared for it,” Bhimani says.

Cricket experts believe that Fletcher, too, has brought about far-reaching changes in English cricket much the same way Woolmer has raised the fitness level of cricketers in Pakistan through his gruelling fitness regime. “The biggest success of Fletcher as coach has been to introduce the concept of central contracts for national players,” says Matt Gatward, deputy sports news editor of The Independent in London . The contract frees the national players from the pressures of county cricket and helps them focus on national cricket.

Former Pakistani Test cricketer Mudassir Nazar credits Woolmer with grooming several new arrivals in the national team. “It was Woolmer who worked very hard to groom new boys and injected a dose of confidence in them to play international matches with ease,” he says.

Rashid Khan, a former Pakistani Test cricketer, feels it would be wrong to blame Woolmer for all that is wrong with Pakistan cricket. “I don’t hold him responsible alone for the sorry state of affairs as the onus for poor performances also lies equally with the players,” he says.

In any case, many feel it would be foolhardy to regard these three coaches as a spent force. “I wouldn’t come to an instant judgement,” Bose says.

Yet, the 2007 World Cup can change all that. It will, indeed, be a defining moment for the three coaches as they prepare their charges for the battle royale. The result will decide, once and for all, whether the hate mail targeted at Chappell will turn into fan mail. Or Fletcher and Woolmer have indeed reached the end of their shelf lives.