Chappell hits Ganguly where it hurts

By John Cheeran
When Greg Chappell spoke the truth regarding his relationship with Sourav Ganguly to The Guardian, quite a few feathers were ruffled. Naturally.
Chappell lays it bare how BCCI was ran during Jagmohan Dalmiya’s time.
He admits that without Ganguly’s influence, he would not have got the coaching job. But Chappell also says by preferring him as the coach Ganguly was trying to run him as the skipper did with John Wright.
Chappell also hits Ganguly where it hurts.
By clinging on to captaincy former Indian skipper Ganguly was ensuring his financial well being, not his team’s.
The BCCI has reprimanded Chappell for his remarks on Ganguly since the latter, as is his won’t , cried and complained to the BCCI.
So what? Now we all know how hollow a man Ganguly is.
Excerpts from Guardian correspondent Mike Selvy’s interview with Indian team coach Greg Chappell.
“For a while, the Ganguly issue - the captaincy passed to Rahul Dravid after it all came to a head during the tour of Zimbabwe - became all consuming. For the good of all, Chappell is keen to move it on from it now. Some years back, Ganguly had come to him for coaching.
"I helped him with his batting then," said Chappell, "so maybe he thought I would be his mate and support him now. Certainly there is no way I would have got the job here without his influence. I'm sure he thought he would be able to run me as he did John in the latter part of his time as coach.
But we clashed because his needs as a struggling player and captain and those of the team were different.
"I'm not the hard-nosed control freak that I have been portrayed. I'm thorough, a realist, a pragmatist and I'm honest. Much has been written and said, a lot of it misleading, but in essence I told Sourav that if he wanted to save his career he should consider giving up the captaincy. He was just hanging in there. Modest innings were draining him. He had no energy to give to the team, which was helping neither him nor us. It was in his own interest to give himself mind space to work on his batting so that it could be resurrected.
He was not prepared to do that. What I didn't realise at that stage was how utterly important to his life and finances being captain was.
"The controversy will carry on but I have learned if I can't be totally impervious to it then it is beyond my control. I have to let it wash by and say 'people have their reasons for saying what they do and I can't be distracted by that' and do what I believe in. At the end of my time, whenever that might be, the team and therefore I will be judged ultimately on the results we achieve, not whether I have been able to convince this or that member of the media that what we are doing is in the best interests of Indian cricket."