Baz's Blues

Being Brendon McCullum is about the most thankless job in World Cricket at the moment.

Mud sticks. Just ask the Bangalore Royal Challengers, whose disastrous IPL campaign last year provided much negative publicity and behind-the-scenes bickering, resulting in personnel changes. What awaits the Kolkata Knight Riders when this season is done is anyone's guess, but no one can be feeling the heat as much as skipper Brendon McCullum.

Shah Rukh Khan's hyperbole, John Buchanan's multiple-captaincy theory, and the Fake IPL Player Blog have together provided an uncomfortable subtext to the KKRs' miserable performances this season, as dissected in this Cricinfo article. McCullum's own form has been terrible, and this has been a great shame for the tournament so far; a destructive batsman who really should be in his element in this format, has been found out by a combination of occasionally incisive new ball bowling and the unfamiliar pressures of captaincy. Additionally, the luck is certainly not running with him - as that lbw decision off Ashish Nehra, after starting the innings off with a six, confirmed. Add to this the frustration of having to preside over those final-over defeats, and you have a campaign which has not been so much hopeless as bizarre.

It appears obvious that McCullum was chosen as a compromise candidate, with the powers-that-be seemingly not in favour of Saurav Ganguly's continuation. This was an ill-informed move. Whether Ganguly should have been retained as skipper is a separate issue; on the evidence of his limited captaincy experience in New Zealand colours, McCullum would really have been better off having to deal with his batting (and keeping) alone. Last year, during the home T20 Internationals against England, he appeared extremely distracted by the sudden burden of captaincy and ended up with scores of 9 and 5. Yet, when Vettori returned to captain the side during the ODIs, he flourished with the bat. When he captained NZ again against India during the Christchurch ODI, he was powerless to stop the batting onslaught as a total of 392 was conceded. In addition, it has taken a long time in this tournament for him to finally hand over the wicketkeeping duties to Wriddhiman Saha, after which his performances with the bat have notably improved. The combined responsibilities of captaincy, wicketkeeping and opening the batting allow for zero degrees of freedom; Alec Stewart, who skippered England for a year up to their miserable 1999 World Cup campaign, will testify.

Critics, though, seem to forget that McCullum has practically built his career on reinventing himself. I remember the time (during the early weeks of 2002) I watched him on debut in Australia, a nervous 20-year-old specialist opener whose head position was all wrong, and didn't really see a future for him in the NZ setup. He was duly dropped, but by the start of the World Cup next year he had forced his way back into the side as a wicketkeeper. His batting was still developing, but his only contributions of note for a while were slow, stubborn innings with the same apparent technical deficiencies. Yet gradually, as more opportunities with the bat presented themselves (aided by frequent top-order collapses), Baz blossomed into a destructive lower order batsman with a surprising range of strokes, capable of succeeding in test cricket; and his glovework had gone from inconsistent to solid and occasionally spectacular. He has since stepped up to the opener's slot as we know in the one dayers, while in the test arena he has had to battle criticisms of reckless shot selection - which he addressed successfully in the recent series against India. It is this willingness to adapt to the circumstances which makes McCullum a popular figure in the IPL, for he hasn't tried to hide behind excuses and appears to have the sympathy of the players and the management. Ideally, he should forget this brush with captaincy and get back to doing what he does best.

Despite his offer of resignation upon his side's failure to make the semi finals, McCullum still has a lot to play for in the remaining three games. He needs to justify the faith (and far more importantly, the 700,000 dollars) invested in him by the establishment. With nothing to lose (besides the small matter of a contract), it might just be that the real Brendon McCullum stands up in the remaining games, and that would make compelling viewing.