It had to be said, sometime ago that Sourav Ganguly hadn’t really shot up like a rocket blasting off into space when they showed him the door as India’s cricket board president and he, playing to the Bengal gallery, seemed to harrumph before promising a bigger jump in life, which left his targeted audience tickled pink. But his promised upward mobility ~ if it was that ~ stopped at landing a job as Delhi Capitals’ director of cricket in the Indian Premier League, which might not have aroused envy among his peers, a few of whom dutifully took his side blaming the franchise’s then-sliding fortunes on Ricky Ponting, the coach, rather than him, though the former India captain was quite hands-on. What he said himself, after an ego-deflating fifth successive defeat, was focused on David Warner, the captain, whose hands, according to Ganguly, were what needed to be strengthened as he was the central figure in the story.

This, of course, implied that Ganguly was washing his hands of the widely-commented-on disaster though he had been participating in it since before the IPL began this time around, supervising a preparatory camp in Kolkata and informally looking for a wicketkeeper in the absence of the seriously injured Rishabh Pant. But it was going low rather than high as it laid bare an impulse for making oneself scarce when the chips were down, a pathetic commonplace in contemporary sport deeply resented by sportsmen who would feel let down when what they needed most was protection from a media asking questions that were not for them to answer, officially or unofficially.

Advertisement

But Ganguly had already allowed another, equally regrettable storm, packing plenty of rain and thunder, to build around himself: Virat Kohli, having won Bangalore’s game versus Delhi, dispensed with the formal civilities attendant upon the occasion, and simply saw through Ganguly at the dug-out. It wasn’t long before word came through that he’d snapped one of his social media links with someone who had, like him, once led India in the international game. And shortly afterwards, Ganguly, the erstwhile chief of the country’s cricket board who’d spoken personally to Kohli, then captain, days after taking over to have a day-night Test at Eden Gardens against Bangladesh, hit back in a tit-for-tat measure, cutting him out of contact on the same social media platform. What underlay the passive-aggressive exchanges was, of course, Kohli finding himself up against it when Ganguly led the board and eventually becoming the man who lost the power game.

It wouldn’t have mattered much if Ganguly had not retaliated: seniors are eventually deferred to when they are perceived to have their heart in the right place. Ganguly, picking the wrong flight path, denied himself