A lonely leader

The saddest part of the current Indian Premier League has been watching Brendon McCullum slowly go to pieces. The swaggering, tattooed hard-hitting batsman has become almost a thing of memory, replaced by a lonely figure wearing an increasingly haunted look as his team stumbles from one nightmare to another.
His trials have not been on the field alone; they have come in the press conferences, where he has attempted to explain the inexplicable. At Port Elizabeth, he snapped at a journalist who asked him whether the exodus of Sanjay Bangar and Aakash Chopra was a sign the team would crack down on poor performers. "What are you trying to get at, mate?" was the terse reply. In Durban last week, asked whether his announcement that he would quit as captain was an emotional reaction, he said, "That's your call. Captains all over the world feel the pressure and I think should be accountable."
Like any top sportsmen, McCullum is a very competitive man and though his national side, New Zealand, don't win everything, they don't lose as badly as Kolkata Knight Riders or look as pathetic. And he has never captained before. "It hurts 20 times more when you lose as a captain," he has said. Especially captain of a team that can't bat, can't bowl and can't field itself through to a win.
Worst of all, the captain has been among the chief non-performers. A man who scored 69 off 55 balls in his last Twenty20 international just over two months ago has been out first ball, has patted short wide balls to fielders, dropped sitters, demoted himself and reinstated himself.
He has tried everything but nothing has worked. That has probably hurt the most. "I have found it difficult to deliver messages to the team without having individual performances to stack up," he said. Only good captains can pull off that trick. Mark Taylor went a year without any batting performances and Sourav Ganguly has been known to get angry with his players for fielding lapses despite being the slowest on the field. It takes strong character and a sense of ownership to achieve it. McCullum's lack of captaincy experience has been shown up in this tournament. He might have made the offer to quit on grounds of accountability but it has perhaps led to an image of a weak captain and a sensitive man under duress.