All hail Lord Snooty

So this is it. Forget Anil Kumble’s exit. Forget that this could conceivably be Rahul’s final Test. To know that Nagpur is currently staging Sourav Ganguly’s five-day farewell is to know that an era is well and truly over.

He may not have captured imaginations like Sachin, nor won as many games as Anil, nor enchanted as many purists as VVS, not erected as many walls as Rahul, but Sourav, more than anybody, has embodied the new India.

Skill, commitment and ambition are all very well and good, but what a team needs to take that quantum leap from promise to fulfilment is someone who detests giving an inch, much less losing. If that person happens to be able to toss a coin with reasonable efficiency and give a lively press conference, so much the better.

It is not impossible to imagine India threatening Australia’s hegemony without Ganguly’s barbed, aggressive, street-smart leadership, but it is exceedingly difficult. Yes, his sides contained five of the best batsmen (himself included) and two of the finest spinners ever to represent India. But would they have beaten the best without that uncompromising lead? Could they have prospered as they did without that determination, a determination so remorseless and plain you could see a permanent glint of steely mischief in those bright brown eyes? I doubt it on both counts.

Being born into money has its downs as well as its ups. The self-assurance that stems from financial security cannot be underestimated, but the drive to prove you can succeed on your own merits can be all-consuming, and hence ill-directed. Unlike the vast majority of the so-called “genetleman amateur” Englishmen of yore, whom he so often resembled in his unquestioning self-belief and superior air, he has given cricket his all, meeting every challenge head-on and overcoming every hurdle.

He has never courted popularity, and was downright unpopular during his stint with Lancashire, where he was nicknamed “Lord Snooty” and so alienated teammates they had vacated the balcony by the time he went to salute it following his belated first half-century. The rift was exacerbated, admittedly, by the fact that Ganguly travelled around the country with his wife and seldom bought into the dressing-room-as-home bonding ethic, but while detachment in that environment rarely works, it has its advantages when the going gets rougher and tougher.

Left-handed, deceptively leisurely and apt to dismiss decent deliveries from his presence with the same imperious ease he dispatched unwanted press queries, Ganguly the batsman has been a pleasure to watch ever since I saw that cool-headed maiden Test century at Lord’s in 1996. There has always been a perceived chink against the short stuff, but he is hardly the first to have been wary on that front. My favourite memory remains the 1999 World Cup, when he and Dravid teed off against Sri Lanka, the holders, at a sunkissed Taunton.

It was a curious confluence of player and stage. Sited in a market town deep in the English west country, a zillion miles spiritually from Bengal, the County Ground, currently in the throes of a handsome redevelopment, is an intimate arena. The square, furthermore, can be relied upon to reduce bowlers to gibbering impotence - hence Somerset’s enduring inability to win the County Championship. No regular visitor, however, could have anticipated the ensuing carnage.

Caning Kenyans and Canadians is one thing, but no senior nation had received an ODI hiding like the one meted out to Murali and company by Ganguly and Dravid that day. With the air of a club pro knocking in a new six-iron, Ganguly lofted seven sixes and swanned, with no apparent effort whatsoever, to 183 off 158 balls - a competition-best against a full ICC member. India’s 373-6 was the highest such in any ODI to that point. The pair added 318 in 45 overs, outstripping the extant one-day record alliance by fully 43 runs. Then we all went home to watch Manchester United steal the European Cup.

To find a more revealing measure of the man, and the leader, let’s go back to the aftermath of his finest hour. It’s April 2001, and India have just inflicted Australia’s second series defeat in eight years, in the process terminating that record-busting sequence of 16 Test victories strung together by Steve Waugh’s hordes. Waugh had accused his opposite number of deliberately turning up late for the toss throughout the tour but even with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy safely won, Ganguly was not about to yield an inch.

Cue the deadest of dead bats: "There's so much to do in the mornings, knocking up, talking to the selectors, that I may have been late by a few minutes." One can only imagine the amount of sniggering going on under his breath. Waugh was even less gruntled at Indore, and with greater reason, alleging that Ganguly had tried to con him that the coin had come down in his favour. Ganguly insisted he simply bent over the coin to see which side was uppermost and could not tell heads from tails. More admirable was the refusal to let Waugh get under his skin as he had burrowed so deeply under the Australian’s flesh. "I could not be bothered what Waugh says,” he harrumphed. “I am within my rights to seek a clarification from the match referee.”

Not that Waugh let it die easily, In his autobiography, he called Ganguly "elitist", not to mention a "bloke who made a few rules for himself in his exalted position". Even so, he could not completely suppress his admiration. "I saw in Sourav a committed individual,” wrote the man generally decreed to have been the most committed cricketer of his generation, “who wanted to inject some toughness and combativeness into a side that had often tended in the past to roll over and expose a soft underbelly." Whether from captain to captain or man to man, there is no higher praise.

Fortunately for India, after one false start with Dravid followed by Kumble’s brief reign, another streetfighter has inherited Ganguly’s mantle. Cue new era.

(It is also the end of this fairly old and probably run-down blog, so thankyou for your interest, your indulgence and your spirited rejoinders.)