One of the golden principles in team sport is that what happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room.
The dressing room is the sanctuary of the players, a private space where they can be their own selves, without fear of being judged. It’s where, given the high stakes and high pressures of competitive sport, they can let off steam, vent their emotions, secure in the knowledge that those outbursts, if any, will remain there, insulated from the eyes of the outside world.
At least, that’s how it is in theory.
In practice, it works differently. Depending on the extent of these ‘vents’, and the personnel involved, these so-called private confabulations conveniently make it to public domain. That does little to help team spirit; if people start doubting each other and wondering who has been doing the selective ‘leaking’, it does little to instill confidence in one another, which is anathema to the basic requirement – camaraderie – of doing well on the field of play.
The timing of the alleged ‘leaks’ from the Indian camp in the aftermath of the debilitating Melbourne defeat to Australia couldn’t have been worse. Only three days remained between the MCG loss and the start of the final Test, at the SCG, with the series very much alive and India still in with a shot at retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. On the face of it, nothing much has changed within the Indian camp. There was no residual tension at nets on Thursday afternoon at the Sydney Cricket Ground, nor during the customary touch-football warm-up exercise. It looked like normal service was underway, which is a good thing because of how much is invested in the next five days. If there are undercurrents, that can’t be great news though the past provides enough evidence of how these undercurrents invariably take a temporary back seat when the players get out in the middle.
Leaks aren’t extraordinarily rare in a team environment, across disciplines and countries. That’s how ‘homeworkgate’ exploded in Australia’s face during their 2013 tour of India. Then coach Mickey Arthur’s demand that each player outline three points by which individuals and the team could get better ahead of the third Test in Mohali (Australia were already 0-2 down) was not met within the set deadline by four players – vice-captain Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, James Pattinson and Usman Khawaja – who were subsequently ‘suspended’ from the Mohali match. Predictably, Australia went on to lose the series 0-4, the first time they suffered a clean sweep against India.
Indian cricket hasn’t been insulated from ‘leaks’, the most obvious being the very private email Greg Chappell had sent to the Board of Control for Cricket in India from the tour of Zimbabwe in mid-2005 where, among other things, he had cast doubts over Sourav Ganguly’s commitment to fitness and training, adding that the skipper fell ‘well below the acceptable level’ in the parameters of batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy that he believed embodied the ‘Commitment to Excellence’ theme he had spoken about at his interview to succeed John Wright as India’s head coach.
Within no time, what was supposed to be a confidential email was out in the open, widening an already growing rift between the captain and the coach which resulted in Ganguly being stripped of his leadership role at the end of the said tour even though India won 2-0 against a severely weakened Zimbabwe outfit.
More recently, one-sided and malicious misinformation on the supposed Virat Kohli-Anil Kumble standoff surfaced in 2017, resulting in the great leg-spinner turning down the offer to come on board for a second term as head coach even though his name was recommended to the BCCI by the three-man Cricket Advisory Committee of Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and Ganguly.
The only way how India can benefit out of this entire situation
This latest ‘leak’ revolves around the interaction between the head coach and the players in the immediacy of the Melbourne defeat. Gambhir is said to have cracked the whip and put players on notice. “Those are just reports. That’s not the truth,” the head coach snapped at a press conference on Thursday afternoon. “There were some honest words, that’s all I can say. Honesty is extremely important if you want to go on and achieve some great things.”
Especially in the volatile world of Indian cricket, when the feeling of being persecuted against seeps in, the team somehow finds ways and means to rouse itself. It happened immediately after Monkeygate in 2008, the response swift and immediate when India became the first Asian team to win a Test at Perth’s WACA ground. If India of 2025 can invoke that spirit and reprise the WACA at the SCG, something good would still have come out of this unsavoury development.
