Sunil Dev, a Delhi and Districts Cricket Association mainstay for as long as one can remember, is having a minor field day with this revelation. As manager of the Indian team for the eventful tour, he, as reported by a section of the media, has swiftly identified the problem, pinning it down to the presence of the lady friend of the struggling Indian star.
"Foreign players do take their girlfriends on tours, but India's culture is different," Dev is reported to have declared.
In this din, graver issues have not been addressed; for instance, how and why captain MS Dhoni skipped a vital round of nets for a spot of range shooting just after the fourth Test and ahead of the final Test, both of which got over in pretty much the same time of two-and-a half days.
The question of Anushka Sharma's presence does not even fully belong to the realm of the Wives and Girlfriends (WAGS) culture as is suffered by the equally-hapless England footballers at each World Cup. Maybe there is a latent Victorian influence here, but the Indian case gets amplified by our own medieval mindsets and regressive perceptions.
Teams from modern, forward-thinking societies do not baulk at the presence of female partners if things go wrong for the men. When Neymar got clobbered in his back against Colombia at the World Cup, the cameras instantly panned to his girlfriend, Bruna Marquezine weeping in the VIP stands.
It only later showed manager Luiz Felipe Scolari's shell-shocked face. Nobody asked why Marquezine, a much-sought after TV star herself, was so visible or even accompanying the Brazilian party.
In India, where the cricketers - and, Indian men - are always referred to as "boys" and seldom thought of as grownups, such moral wranglings and archaic questions of culture are bound to arise. One is reminded of the first-ever column that the once imperious Kapil Dev wrote after his retirement from international cricket.
It was on the eve of the 1996 World Cup and the much-married India skipper Mohd Azharuddin was under fire for being accompanied openly by his then girlfriend, whom he later married.
Many thought the distraction would harm India's chances in the tournament at home, and Kapil Dev, probably sensing the growing apprehension, set out to assuage the fears.
He wrote of how in his experience as an India cricketer, the forbidding rule which disallowed wives or partners on long tours and the closed atmosphere could have almost forced the men to turn to each other.
And before one is mistakenly attacked for homophobia here, all Kapil Dev was attempting to highlight was that the cricketers were adults like those from other teams and countries and should be allowed to live their lives as responsible adults. But, little it seems, has changed in the 18 years since.
While the more bandied about idea is that young Indian men are not adept psychologically at handling constant female 'intrusion' especially in such a high concentration task as Indian Test cricket, somewhere, it also has to do with the Kohli's girlfriend's high-profile status. Had it been an unknown face that accompanied Kohli to England, the Indian team manager would have struggled to come up with a similar gem.
But maybe, Sunil Dev is right.
It is fine for foreign players to take their girlfriends on tours, but in Indian culture, maybe it would have been all right, perfect actually, in his world, if mothers were allowed to accompany their star sons on tour. After all, the Indian team has had a rich history of cricketer mothers publicly vetting their sons' girlfriends. In India, and in cricket, it is better to be a mama's boy than to be your own man.
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