Clive Lloyd and MS Dhoni were never the best players in their teams

Clive Lloyd had batsmen like Vivian Richards and Gordon Greenidge or Collin Kings who were far better than him as also he had the fiercest bowling attack of his time in the form of Collin Croft, Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Malcom Marshall as well as one of the best all –time wicket keepers in the form of Dereck Murray. Each of them were individually far more valuable to the team as individual players than Clive Lloyd. Yet there was something that Lloyd did with these players to make the West Indies the most invincible team in the world of cricket through the 1970’s and for early part of 1980’s.

Fast forward twenty five years to 2007. When MS Dhoni became the captain of the Indian cricket team, he had arguably the best all time batsman to have walked on earth in his team in the form of Sachin Tendulkar. He had the highest all time wicket taker for India and a world renowned spin bowler like Anil Kumble, not to mention the Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman type of extra ordinary batsmen or for that matter the big hitters of the ball like Yuvraj Singh in his team. Yet, there was something that MS Dhoni did that has made him the most successful captain that any India cricket team has had ever since India joined international cricket way back in 1932.

Go back to the 1992 World Cup winning team of Pakistan. Imran Khan was most certainly not the best player in that team. The strike bowler of that team, for those who can recollect, was the then young and upcoming start, Wasim Akram and the best batsmen in that team were the debutant Inzimam-ul- Haq besides of course the run-getting machine of Javed Miandad. Yet, this team did extra-ordinarily well to win the World-Cup in Australia & New Zealand defeating some of the most in-form teams in the world of cricket.

Few other examples closer home were Saurav Ganguly in recent times and Kapil Dev who actually changed the face of limited overs game for India forever in 1983 with his World Cup win, and if we go back a few decades, for those interested in the history of Indian cricket, would recollect how the Late Lala Amarnath had troubled the legendary Sir Don Bradman with his field placements way back in the pre-Independence period. Nearer home, one cannot forget Arjuna Ranatunge who took Sri Lanka to the historic World Cup win in 1996 though the star players in that World Cup winning team was not him but Sanath Jayasurya or Muralitharan or Chamuda Vas.

There are numerous examples that I can think of from the world of cricket where some of the outstanding captains have never been the best players in their respective teams but they had something in them to galvanize superlative performance from their teams, consistently and against difficult odds.

That actually brings me to the hypothesis that leadership is not about being the best-in-class in a specific area of expertise but it involves behaviors which are distinct and that earns them the leadership role for which they are truly accepted and respected as leaders by even people who are more competent or have greater expertise than the leader himself. The few qualities that all these leaders brought to the field were:

1. Credibility: Credibility is a function of competence and results. They had both. A leader does not need to be better than everyone else in the team; however, the leader needs to have the credibility for him to be accepted as a leader even by people who are more competent than him (I am using the masculine gender here only because this is in reference to men’s cricket but the needless to reiterate that the concept is gender agnostic). Credibility comes from having competence (knowledge/ skill) in the area as also from the proven track record of delivering results consistently over time. They were known for having a comprehensive understanding of the game and they were known for consistently playing their part whenever their teams needed them. In other words, they had the competence in their field even if they were not the best-in-class in their teams. Nobody could ever point a finger in their ability to understand the game better than anyone else and they were dependable to play their part whenever there was a crunch situation. That is, their competence in the game was beyond any doubt. The second part of credibility is the ability to deliver results consistently. This is where each of them demonstrated that their competence was not just an arm-chair competence but something they could translate on the field, not once like a flash in the pan, but consistently time and again. Clive Lloyd had built an invincible side all through the 1970s and all the way up to 1983 World Cup when it was another great leader, Kapil Dev, who snatched the World Cup title from the mighty West Indies. Clive Lloyd’s team had won two consecutive World Cups till then and it remained a record for the next two decades till Australia could achieve the same feat in 2003.Competence requires the ability to earn the trust of all those one leads. If a leader fails to earn the trust of those one leads, it is unlikely that person would be accepted as a leader for long. Some may recollect a difficult phase in the history of Pakistan cricket when large number of players refused to accept Javed Miandad as the captain of the Pakistan cricket team in the 1980’s though he was by far the most successful batsman then.Competence also calls for the ability to insist on the highest standards from all players in the team. Imran Khan was known for demanding the best from each and every team member. Captaincy (or leadership for that matter) is not the place to win popularity amongst others. Since many of the most successful captains have demanded the very best from each and every member of their team, not once, but repeatedly, they have rarely been the most popular amongst their team mates. However, what nobody would ever deny is that each of them were fair to all and played favorites to none. That’s what help them gain credibility and thereby their competence as a captain. For them, it was winning the game that mattered and not the politics within the team (though some of them themselves fell victim to politics outside their domain).Last but not the least, competence calls for having the ability to stand-up for what they felt was right in the interest of the game for their respective teams. None of them were simply “yes-men” to their bosses in the world of cricket. Each of them had their occasions when they had to stand-up for what they believed in- whether it was to include a particular player in the team or to drop some player or whether it was for more tactical decisions on the ground. Each of them were known to have a strong belief in what decisions they were taking and had the ability to stand by them even in the face of adversity.
2. Confidence: This is obvious but the confidence that these captains exuded was contagious to say the least. This is very distinct from being fool hardy. These captains had innate confidence in the ability of their teams and of course their own ability to decimate even the most difficult of oppositions in the most trying circumstances. This required them to genuinely believe in an audacious goal and to go for it all out. The operative phrase over here is to “genuinely believe” in that audacious goals. It is one thing to create a rhetoric and quite another to create a contagious belief in an audacious goal. Rewind back to May 1983- India had barely won one (yes, that is right only one) World Cup match in the previous two versions of the tournament in 1975 and 1979 and that too it was against East Africa which did not have a Test playing status not just then but for many years thereafter. Not just World Cups, India had lost almost evert limited overs international match till then against all Test playing countries. If you are leading a team with this kind of a record, it is not likely that you are going to exude a lot of confidence going into the third version of this World Cup. But that is where Kapil Dev differed from umpteen others. He did not set any audacious claim like being able to win the World Cup or anything like that. But what he did was to make it clear that India would be a force to reckon with in that World Cup. This was contagious because despite the poor track record people in India started believing that this time the team would do much better than previous World Cups (to be fair, very few would have anticipated that India would beat the West Indies to win the World Cup). With every win in the qualifying round, the belief became stronger and stronger. That’s what confidence does- (a) it can be contagious if the origin is genuine and not a rhetoric; and (b) it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy when it leads to early success which breeds further confidence and then it becomes a virtuous cycle.The second thing about confidence is the ability to take quick decisions. Remember Joginder Singh- in case you have forgotten, he was the one who bowled the decisive over in 2007 T-20 World Cup final. The decision to given the crucial over to him was Dhoni’s and it could well have backfired. However, the fundamental difference that confidence does to a leader is it makes it easier to take bold decisions. Not every bold decision is a hit, but the absence of any bold decisions ensures that the team never rises above mediocrity. Ranatunge decided to open the Sri Lanka innings in 1996 World Cup with the blistering Kaluwitharna (the wicket keeper batsman) and Sanath Jayasurya to score as many runs as possible in the first 15 overs while the field restrictions were still in place. Remember, those days there was no “power play”. This was a very bold decision at that time which no other team was subscribing to. But if there was one reason to ascribe for Sri Lanka’s phenomenal performance in that World Cup, it was this strategy. True this strategy was fraught with risks because if early wickets were lost and that too of Sanath Jayasurya (who was the star batsman of the team) it could well create serious trouble for Sri Lanka. It did backfire on a couple of occasions but by far this was the game changer, not just for Sri Lanka in the 1996 World Cup, but for the entire strategy for limited over games in the years to come.
3. Responsibility: The captain (or the leader) takes ownership for the performance of the entire team and does not restrict to his area of expertise alone. Going back to the 1983 World Cup, it would have been easy for Kapil Dev to blame the top order batsmen for the disastrous innings against Zimbabwe at Tentbridge Wells when India were 5 wickets down with only 17 runs on the scoreboard. However, it was Kapil Dev who took the responsibility of turning around India’s innings with a swashbuckling 175 not out to reach a very respectable score of around 265 (don’t remember the exact score now) and then went on to beat Zimbabwe in that historic match. Leaders need to get into the details of every area if they are to take responsibility for the whole team. They cannot be superficial for that would prevent them from taking genuine responsibility for the entire team.  

Taking responsibility does not refer to doing someone else’s job but it means understanding the work of every area so well that one is well informed to taking decisions pertaining to any area should the occasion arise. Though Dhoni may not have bowled any over in international cricket (certainly not as a serious bowler) but his ability to rotate the bowlers so aptly can happen only when he understands which bowler would be effective in which circumstances. And that calls for taking responsibility for the entire team rather than focusing only within a narrow silo.

4. Strategic Thinker: Ability to think strategically about the game is what often makes the captain extraordinary from dozen of ordinary ones. For example, it was the late Lala Amarnath who first set a field placement of 3 or 4 Slips with no mid-off and extra-cover for Sir Don Bradman thereby enticing him to play his favorite cover drive where an outside edge could lead to his dismissal. This was a very unorthodox field placement in those days and required a complete out-of –the box thinking.Another very peculiar characteristic amongst these outstanding captains have been that their decisions are right a lot, most of the times. Kapil Dev’s decision to bring in Madan Lal to bowl to Vivian Richards when the latter was in full throttle in the 1983 World Cup Finals turned out to be the most decisive decision with the benefit of hind sight. Dhoni’s decision to switch bowlers right in the middle of a tense game, more often than not, turns out to be the right decision. This is an uncanny characteristic of such great captains whose decisions more often than not, turn out to be the right one at the right moment.The third strategic characteristic of these great captains have been their ability to pick up the right talent for their teams. Inzimam ul Haq was hand-picked by Imran Khan for the 1992 World Cup and what a decision it turned out to be. Similarly, Balwinder Singh Sandhu was a little known medium pacer prior to the 1983 World Cup but what an impact he had on the mighty West Indian batsmen with his swing bowling. Similarly, Ravichandra Ashwin is a protégé of Dhoni and he is turning out to be a strike bowler for India in all forms of the game. These captains know early which player could be a match- winner for them and they do not hesitate to place their bets on such talent which may well be unproven until then.

5. Humility: Last but by no way the least, is being humble. All these captains have been extremely grounded in reality despite tons of success to their credit. In the world of cricket, as in anywhere else in life, this is one virtue which is so easily forgotten with success and which so often has been the cause of downfall of so many leaders across diverse fields. They never let past success intoxicate them to the extent that they forgot concentrating on the next goal. They gave due respect to their opposition team’s abilities without being arrogant of their own success. Clive Lloyd’s defeat in the 1983 World Cup to India was clearly a reflection of the arrogance of his entire team though I am not sure if he himself had become arrogant. Humility enabled them to focus on the immediate task at hand instead of basking in the glory of past successes while they were battling for another title. Hence these captains had repeated successes one after the other.The other quality that comes with humility is able to see one’s own areas for improvement. All these captains had a tremendous knack to see where their own team’s deficits lie and they were able to identify the same and work on it consciously to remove them. When one becomes arrogant, one gets completely blind to the areas of improvement in one’s own backyard until they become so large that they actually lead to the decimation of the whole. The steady decline and ultimate decay of West Indies cricket since late 1980s has been because of their inability to focus steadfastly on where their weaknesses lie and how to go about bridging them.