In Shastri-Sehwag's fight for a bite, the 'coach cake' might land on Moody's lap

By GS Vivek

One of the qualities of being a dutiful father, I have realized, is to have a collection of good bed-time stories. I tried plucking one from my grandma collection to put my two-year-old daughter to sleep, deciding to tell her the ‘Two-cats-and-a-monkey’ story.

The story goes thus:

Two cats were prowling together. One of the cats saw a big delicious looking cake and meowed. The other jumped up and picked it. The first cat said, “It is my cake because I saw it first”. The other cat said, “It is my cake because I picked it up.”A monkey offered to mediate and split the cake into two parts, deliberately keeping one part big. The Monkey shook his head and said, “Oh No! One is slightly bigger than the other one. Let me take a bite of the bigger one so it is as big as the other one.” He had a big bite of the bigger piece of the cake and said “Oh No! This has become smaller now.”  He ate from the other. And thus, he went on eating from part to part and finally finished the whole cake.

By the time I told my daughter the moral of the story --- when you quarrel and fight, someone else gains, it had served its purpose. She was fast asleep and I could happily get back to watching Virat Kohli punish a hapless West Indies while the statisticians scribbled another record against his name.

 It was then, a thought suddenly struck me, and I wondered if it all made sense. I placed characters from Team India into the bedtime story. So there you go again:

Two cricketing legends --- Ravi Shastri and Virender Sehwag saw the offer of becoming Team India coach. Sehwag applied first because Virat had asked him to do so and was the immediate favourite. Shastri applied later but his more friendly equations with Virat has tilted the scales completely in his favour.

This ‘catfight’ (pun unintended) got bigger and the media fed on it to take it to gigantic proportions and the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman are squeaking uneasily.

So what will Virat say now? That Shastri is more close to me than Sehwag? Or what will the CAC say? That they are picking Sehwag because they don’t want Shastri, like last year? As per my sources, Ganguly wants Sehwag, Tendulkar is firmly behind Shastri. So it’s back to good soul Laxman to make the decisive verdict.

And then when you scan through applicants, CAC realised that there is Tom Moody as well – a man most qualified as per coaching credentials, enjoys a great rapport with most Team India players in IPL and loves a background image which Virat demands primarily.

And is when the other equations come into effect. The crucial Laxman vote can tilt towards Moody because he works alongside him in the IPL for Sunrisers Hyderabad. And so, when there is a big fight happening between Sehwag and Shastri candidatures and no real reason to pick either one of them, BCCI might just try and pitch in for a consensus candidate. There are benefits of a foreign coach. The BCCI can sit on his head anytime, so can a skipper and he is an easy scapegoat in event of a team failure.

For someone who made a conscious decision to get rid of foreign coach syndrome, the CAC and the BCCI might just find the ‘monkey’ on their back once again. The reporter inside me will definitely look into this story but it’s my hunch that Tom Moody might just quietly benefit from all of this.