Yes, well said it is failure of strategy. Some key points, I would consider,
1. Greg was a star in his playing days. He likes to be a star. The problem with such people is they always want to be the center of attention. Again a coach needs very good people skill- telling Murali that he is too old to field may motivate Murali, but that may not work with Kumble - understand them and work with them. At times he needs to be a politician, at times he needs to be tough and at other times he needs to be a mentor. I think Greg needs lots of training to become a successful coach. Clearly I can see the differences when compared to John. Indian management failed to select right coach. I had this view after the first year of his coaching.
Captain: A captain needs to be very aggressive and make members think. He can be soft and gentle outside the field. But he needs to motivate his team and keep them as a team. He has to think pro-actively and execute reactively. He is like a chief operating officer. He should fore-see the problems, and keep his solutions ready. But never execute pro-actively because you need to fix a problem only if there is a problem. Also he needs to show his aggressiveness on the field to give clear messages to the opposition and his own team. This is the difference between Sachin and Ganguly and Dravid and Ganguly (Even though I personally I think Ganguly doesn't have much to offer as a captain any more). Dravid is a very defensive captain (my observation), but he may be able to change. We got an aggressive coach and a soft captain!
Selection: Should be according to merit and playing conditions, here the said policy was only on paper. Again merit includes current form, experience, attitude and developing other players. Dileep was a star player at home. In SA he said "I don't understand why our batsmen fail consistently in bouncy tracks" (as reported by some news agencies). His averages in WI, AUS, and NZ are around 25. The reason I am bringing this case is not to humiliate him, but to question his strategy making. I think it will hard for him to fix this 'foreign track' problem because he could not find the root cause of his problem in the 15 or more years he played for India.
Compensation: Compensation to players must be strictly according to their contributions except on injuries where they should be given best available treatment because they got injured on duty and they should not be afraid on getting injured. Not only players but also coach, management, selectors and administrators should be paid on performance. It is easy to link team performance to the performance of frontline managers and administrators. This will stop the regional bias of selectors and they will start thinking to get best players. And the performance review must be at the end of each series or tournament. Everybody (including Sachin) must be given feedback to improve, average performers (players, officials) must be given opportunity to become above average and bad performers must be punished even after a successful tournament. Creativity should be encouraged, that means action that leads to failure must have a logic behind it and system must have some tolerance to such failures. When comparing apples must be compared with apples, simply means a new face cannot be compared with Sachin. Also John got 15 players to make a team, but Greg got a reasonably developed team to improve the results. Comparing their performances is very difficult. A good way to think is if the team has new problems or not and what he did to fix the old problems are still there or not. Most of the times people won%u2019t scale as the team go through different phases. Ganguly is an example, and another example is Sehwag
These are some of my management thoughts, may not be fully accurate or suite Indian team since I never had any close contact with Indian team and its managers.
