Gautam Gambhir Would Have Bunked IPL Had He Preferred Country Over Club

“Looking at the big picture, the doctors had said that if the injury is aggravated, I might require surgery. People talk about country, and I was thinking only of the country when I decided to take four weeks of rehabilitation instead of going for a surgery.”

Gautam Gambhir, on whether he placed his club’s interests over the country’s.

If all that Gambhir has understood from his criticism of putting club over country is the aforesaid line, then it is a sad commentary of his understanding of the situation. This is, at best, trivialising the issue. At worst, the above statement attempts to gloss over the real issue with scant respect for the fans’ intelligence.

The debate of club versus country is as old as some of the sports like soccer and with cricket seeming to ‘join the club’ as well, the sport will rarely be left behind when instances like these rear their head up. Gambhir, to the uninitiated, had experienced pain in his shoulder on the day of the World Cup final on April and despite a supposedly adverse MRI scan result that came out on April 24, decided to play through the IPL and through pain.

At that stage, there was a definite possibility that the shoulder injury could have got aggravated and the opening batsman could have ended up missing the international series immediately after the IPL. Clearly, Gambhir did not consider that to be a problem and played on.

Then again, Gambhir had a second chance to withdraw from the later stages of the IPL, when there was a clear aggravation of the injury on the last day of the league games in the tournament. While one cannot say with conviction that playing in the playoffs led to the aggravation of the injury and hence to the pull-out from the West Indian tour, one can definitely point out that things could have worsened enough to push Gambhir into needing a surgery – which, in his words, may have necessitated a six-month long rehab.

Yet again, Gambhir decided to go against conventional wisdom and featured in the playoff against the Mumbai Indians. Kolkata lost that game and were knocked out of the IPL, but it would have been interesting to see whether Gambhir would have played on in the semi-final had they won.

Let’s not mix this issue with the decision of some of the players to rest for an international series after the gruelling IPL. In that case, it is a matter of a player trying to protect his body from the rigours of the cricket-excesses; especially given the low-profile nature of the opposition. There are pros and cons to that debate but we will keep that for another day. Here, the issue is of an already injured player running the risk of missing a chunk of the next six months to a year after opting to play on despite the injury. And this, despite being cognizant of the fact that shoulder injuries take their own time to heal unlike other strains.

The simple question that one needs to pose to the cricketers is whether they would continue playing for over a month if they had known before the start of an international tour about an injury of this nature? Certainly don’t think so.

$2.4 million is a huge paycheque for featuring in a 45-day long tournament and to kick it out of reckoning by backing out of the IPL due to an injury would be a tough option to take. But then, that decision to be lured by lucre than to take the pay-cut but get fit for an international series is the reason why fans would claim that Gambhir preferred club over country. And I would certainly not be debating them too much.