Stop Wasting VVS Laxman on the Dugout: Make Him the Architect of Indian Cricket

Every time Gautam Gambhir is unavailable, Indian cricket reaches for the same comfort blanket: hand the team to VVS Laxman as interim head coach. It is meant as a compliment. It is actually a waste — the equivalent of pulling a master architect off the blueprints to lay bricks for a fortnight. You get a wall. You squander the one man who should be designing the entire city.

Laxman should not be India’s stop-gap coach. He should be its Director of Cricket — a role that sits above the head coach, above the selectors, above the administrators, and owns the game across the whole country and every age group. We have already half-admitted this is his calling by handing him the Centre of Excellence, and as I write there are reports that the Board may at last be preparing to do exactly this. Good. But a title is not a system. What follows is what the role must actually mean — because if it becomes merely a senior man in a boardroom, we will have wasted him a second time.

A Coach Owns a Dressing Room. A Director Owns the Pipeline.

A head coach’s horizon is the next series, the next XI, the next toss. A Director of Cricket’s horizon is the next decade. He is not asking who bats at four in the Boxing Day Test. He is asking where India’s number four in 2034 comes from, and what we are doing today to guarantee he exists. Two different jobs, two different temperaments. Laxman — patient, cerebral, a builder of people rather than a chaser of headlines — is built for the second one. Spending him on the first is malpractice.

What the System Actually Does

A Director’s job is to remove luck from the equation. Not slogans — mechanisms. Concretely, the system he builds should:

• Audit selection against birth-quarter. Record the birth month of every age-group player and audit selections against it. Right now we systematically over-pick the January-born, who are simply bigger at fourteen — the relative age effect — and quietly discard late-born talent that matures later. Measure it, correct for it, and stop throwing away half the pool.
• Scout on “many eyes, many times.” A boy is watched across a whole season by multiple assessors, not judged on one trial day, on one pitch, in one mood. One-day trials reward the ready, not the talented.
• Run a rolling development pool. A rolling two-year pool from under-17 upwards, so players are groomed along a defined pathway — not scrambled together weeks before a tournament.
• Never lose a player’s thread. Follow every identified player for years, his progress kept on a shared record — not lost the moment he ages out of an age group.
• Study how good becomes great. How did Rohit Sharma go from a wristy talent to a mountain of an opener? How did Virat Kohli convert ability into relentless output? Reverse-engineer those journeys and feed the lessons back into the pathway, so we build greatness on purpose instead of waiting for it.

We wait for a Sachin. We marvel at a Vaibhav Suryavanshi. But we did not manufacture them — they arrived. The job is to make the good cricketer a reliable output of the system, so that the great one becomes a matter of odds, not miracles.

Build the Support Staff, Not Just the Players

Here is the part Indian cricket forgets: a pathway for players is worthless without a parallel pathway for the people who develop them. The Director must build a pipeline for the next line of support staff — trainers, physios, strength-and-conditioning coaches, analysts, and yes, the next head coach — with the same deliberateness.

That means a credentialing ladder: certify coaches, trainers and physios to defined standards the way medicine and law license their own. It means rotating promising support staff through age-group and state setups so they are seasoned before they reach the national team. And it means that when a head coach is unavailable, the successor is someone the system has grown and vetted — not a name grabbed in a panic.

If you have to improvise your interim coach, your pipeline has already failed.

Systems Beat Geniuses

This is not theory. Other sports have run the experiment, repeatedly, and the systems win.

Germany, football. Humiliated in the group stage of Euro 2000, the DFB forced through a national overhaul: every Bundesliga and second-division club was required to run a certified youth academy as a condition of its licence, backed by a nationwide talent-promotion programme and hundreds of regional talent bases. The team that lifted the 2014 World Cup was built from products of that reformed system. They did not get lucky in Brazil. They built it, deliberately, out of a moment of embarrassment.

Belgium, football. Knocked out early as co-hosts of the same tournament, Belgium — led by Michel Sablon — commissioned the university at Leuven to study its youth football scientifically, made entry-level coaching courses free (enrolment jumped tenfold), standardised one playing philosophy across every academy, and built a national centre at Tubize. A nation of eleven million went from irrelevance to the top of the world rankings, producing Courtois, De Bruyne, Lukaku and a whole golden generation. Their own people are careful about the phrase: the golden generation was not the project — it was proof the project worked.

Britain, Olympic cycling. From almost nothing, British Cycling paired long-term Lottery funding with Peter Keen’s structured world-class plan and, later, Dave Brailsford’s “aggregation of marginal gains” — improve everything by one per cent and let the sum transform you. A couple of world-championship golds in 2002 became nine of the eighteen on offer by 2008, and then domination of successive Olympic Games. A pipeline plus a philosophy plus patient funding — not one gifted rider.

The common thread is impossible to miss: a moment of failure, an institution above the noise that owned the redesign, a written long-term plan, and the patience to let it compound. None of them waited for a genius. All of them built a factory.

Every State Needs Its Own Director — Above the Politics

National reform dies if the states stay broken. Each state association needs one Director of Cricket of its own, working independently of the political setup, placed above coaches, selectors and administrators — someone who understands the local game and its players’ culture, carries a vision for their development, and is insulated from the boardroom churn. Rooted in the local. Immune to the politics.

Give Laxman the Whole Game

So the next time Gambhir is unavailable, find someone for that series — but do not spend Laxman on it. Make him the Director of Cricket. Let him build the factory: the talent pathway, the support-staff pipeline, the roadmaps short and long. And ask every state to appoint its own Director — independent, respected, and above the noise.

That is how you stop praying for the next Sachin — and start producing him.