Did Ganguly's India sabotage Laxman's Career?

Impact Index is a modern-day revolutionary statistics system. Honed by Jaideep Varma and later joined by Soham Sarkhel and Nikhil Narain, it constructs a hitherto unexplored view of the gentleman's game - delving into the unknowns that lie beneath the scorecard, beneath the circumstance, beneath popular supposition.

What it banks on, for this, is the very idea that every number, is a powerful yet simple idea; the idea that statistics is not soporific trivia, it is the stuff of history.

Within their headquarters in Mumbai, an age-old story of frustration and lament is doing the rounds. VVS Laxman was not a contemporary bottom-handed genius like Virat Kohli. Nor was he a three-dimensional cricketer, who would on one day send jitters down the spines of the opposition in coloured clothing and on the other, arrive with the placidity of Vikram Seth's Melon King to murder the patience of a red ball.

He had his strengths and weaknesses, which he was perfectly aware of, and yet, he finds himself amongst some of the greatest of all time to have played our sport wearing the whites.

However, if we take a minimum of forty Tests, India's highest Impact batsmen, according to Impact Index, turn out to be Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, and GR Vishwanath, respectively. Curiously, Navjot Singh Sidhu ranks fifth, followed by Mohammad Azharuddin and Virender Sehwag.

It is unsettling that Laxman comes after them. Enough has been said about his epic 281 not out, which is inevitably going to be part of every single piece written about him. His career average of 45.97 is misleading; because much like Alastair Cook, much like MS Dhoni, he batted for the major part of his career in some of the toughest spots to bat for a specialist batsman.

And yet, at the fall of the fourth Indian wicket, when he came out to the centre and took his guard, he never complained of the fact that being a Test match specialist, he was most vulnerable to scapegoating, which was very often what happened with him.

Laxman often played in the shadows

In a line-up dominated by the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid, and Sehwag, Laxman was always the support artist. His strengths and weaknesses were never in the team's agenda, for he was always making way for Tendulkar to bat at 4 and Dravid at 3.

In fact, in the former part of his career, he was often asked to open the batting for India, which was a disaster -- an average of 24.07 in his first 16 Tests, all at the top of the order, was one of the most inauspicious starts he could've got to his Test career.

But then came that 281*, which instantly changed him into a household name, being discussed over chais, parathas and pakoras. Crackers were burnt and cricket bats purchased -- a new drive of euphoria had enveloped Indian cricket, which all the while until then, was reeking of the abominable scandals of match-fixing.

What Laxman's knock did, which was incidentally unrecorded by statisticians, was to end a two-year recession for petty shopkeepers trading in cricket equipment.

CROSSROADS: Laxman batted

like

a man possessed on that fateful day, unaware of the fact that his 281* would change the face of Indian cricket forever

His other two 'Series Defining performances', as recorded by Impact Index, were in 2010, both of them away from home. One was a dogged 103 not out, seeing the team through a 258 run chase against the mighty Lankans comprising of Muralitharan, Herath, and Vaas, after arriving at the middle when the scorecard read 62-4.

The second, in South Africa in December, was a third-innings effort, in which he scored a famous 96 in a low-scoring encounter, securing the team a formidable lead after India were precariously placed at 56-4.

Laxman played one of his finest innings, to be the last man out, as India won the match by 87 runs and squared the series 1-1, the only time they have managed to do so in the Rainbow Nation.

Ignore the fluency and the grace with which he made his runs, but there was something about the charisma that VVS Laxman oozed that made him irresistible. He was the old school cricket virtuoso who could defend ball after ball after ball, but the class and the poise he radiated even when merely leaving a ball, was what generated the intrigue around him. Former India opener and commentator, Aakash Chopra agrees:

'VVS Laxman was one of those players who would hit you for a four and you wouldn't feel the hurt. He'd cut you and you wouldn't bleed. I remember playing against him in a Duleep Trophy game where he scored 175 or so for South Zone; from time to time, I found myself applauding the shots he was playing, even though they were coming against my own team. There was some kind of poetry in his batting; he'd hit you for three fours and you wouldn't realize you'd been taken for 12 runs in an over.'

The fact, as mentioned earlier, was that VVS Laxman was an incredibly unlucky player. First, he found himself being asked to open the batting after he'd saved India a blush on his debut by top-scoring with an impressive 51, batting for 3 hours at No.6.

Despite failing miserably, he was once again asked to do so later in 2007, in the dark ages of Indian cricket when Greg Chappell was at the helm of affairs. As the story goes, he politely turned down the offer citing his hiccups against the new ball in the initial part of his career.

Chappell's response, in the presence of the entire squad, was cautioning Laxman to be careful, because it was extremely hard making a comeback at the age of 33.

Laxman's performance graph resembles the population pyramid of Japan.

It has been only recently that the best-batsman-bat-at-4 theory has come to be censured. Tendulkar was easily India's best batsman in the 2000s, and he always got the nod to occupy the easiest batting slot.

The openers always have it tough, negotiating a hard, new ball that could swing both ways, against fresh bowlers; Nos. 5 and 6 face the difficulty of a softer ball which is harder to smother and the risk of running out of partners.

That is why the ability to slog the ball and run hard between the wickets is considered a pre-requisite for batting with the tail. Very often, you are on the lookout for quick runs, perhaps due to an impending declaration or due to an outbreak of wickets.

That is also partly why fresh faces making their debuts are tried out at Nos. 6 and 7. Yuvraj Singh, MS Dhoni, Sourav Ganguly, and more recently, Quinton de Kock, are all examples of batsmen who have had prosperous ODI careers but ordinary Test stints, and still found themselves in the XI solely due to these abilities.

VVS Laxman had neither of these. You often found him making the odd run-a-ball innings batting with the tail, but as far as reputation goes, he was certainly not a clean striker of the ball. Nor was he a quick runner between the wickets. And yet, he found himself batting for the major part of his career with the tail, making truckloads of runs at an average of 49.86 across 150 innings at Nos. 5, 6, and 7.

SLOW AND UNFIT: Laxman's running between the wickets had always been a question mark

These arguments are not unsubstantiated. Of his 191 dismissals in Test cricket, 83 (44%) have been caught in the outfield. The next highest mode of dismissal was bowled, which accounted for 20%. As the adage goes, numbers don't lie -- Laxman's natural inability to belt the ball over the ropes is clearly outlined by these stats.

'Laxman's career suffered because of the era he played in.', says Chopra. ' First, he was made to open in Tests, a position he had never batted in during his first-class career. He did well there but at some point, he put his foot down and said that he would rather not play for India than open.

The problem now was that, Nos. 3 and 4 were not available to anyone, thanks to Dravid and Tendulkar. So that's why he was drafted into the middle order. Now with all the skills that he had, he was not an ideal No. 5 or 6 either, and in any case, Ganguly was often No. 5 as well.

'The problem also was that he was purely a Test cricketer and did not really play the other formats. In that situations, your failures tend to get magnified quite a bit but your successes often get forgotten because when there is no Test series for 6 months, people have to jog their memories to come to the conclusion that someone is still in form.

Meanwhile, if another batsman did really well in One-Day cricket, suddenly there was a compelling case to include him in the side, and Laxman became the scapegoat.'

Laxman was dropped from the ODI and Test sides in 2006.

On top of that, he was not a multi-dimensional cricketer. Any slump in batting form could not be compensated for with an exceptional day with the 'keeper gloves, or by turning his arm over to produce a wicket or two out of the blue -- which is precisely what is keeping the likes of Hardik Pandya in the side today.

So it was only natural that he was often shown the door out, to accommodate other utility cricketers (Yuvraj Singh, for instance, happened to be one of them.). Fair to say, out of the other batting certainties in the XI -- Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Gambhir for some time -- it was only the Master himself who could occupy the No. 6 spot.

One would never know what VVS could've done for his team had he batted at the coveted No. 4 spot, which, incidentally, was his batting slot for his domestic side Hyderabad. Conventional thinking, which has proved itself time and again to often backfire, produced the pathological notion that the easiest batting slot was automatically Sachin's, and Laxman through his 134 Test matches for India, batted there on merely 11 instances.

Runs were scored, records galored, and touring teams intimidated at home. But the scapegoat, as ever, remained VVS Laxman.

VVS is all ears for his captain as he walks back to the pavilion after a successful partnership.

That, however, in no way is meant to extenuate the greatness of Tendulkar. The flawed postulate which holds the best batsman of the side as most favoured to bat at No. 4, is fundamentally damaging.

It happened with VVS, and it will continue to happen with many others. Developments such as Joe Root's move to No. 3 to accommodate the ilk of Gary Ballance at No. 4 is heartening to see. The day international cricket moves on from the established, uncontradicted norms that plague Test cricket, it would have taken its biggest, grandest leap.

But as for VVS Laxman, he will always remain a legend, and be remembered up till eternity on the back of that one innings of 281 -- for what he did in 2001, was bringing back energy into depleted stands, barren maidaans, and the closed hearts of a billion cricket fans. VVS Laxman's praise shall still find room, even in the eyes of all posterity.