Leadership Lessons from Cricket Field - Part 3: Dropped Catch

Winters of 2002 was not different than any other year. The chilling winter has thou, started to recede. But, it was still harsh enough on hands on the cricket grounds.

13th February, a day just after my birthday, we had to play semifinals of a tournament in Hayaghat, against a known team (team supported by member of parliament, mentiond in previous episodes) from the same ground we practice. The opponents were superior and tough.

We got to bat first. The conditions were chilling and ball was swinging a lot. Our gritty openers took a lot on their ribcage and we succeeded to put up a fighting total on the board. I scored very few runs, just reached a double digit.

While fielding in slips, I injured my index finger badly. I asked for my replacement on field, to which my captain responded, "you are twice as better fielder with one hand than those on bench, so continue". As a favour, he released me from the slips and positioned me at point, thinking most of the balls will pass by my left hand side and I can manage.

I saved couple of boundaries diving to my left. But, it was inevitable that at some point that I may fail due to injured right hand, despite being a safe fielder. The inevitable happened during an over of an arrogant bowler of my team. I dropped a "dolly" at point, that too of the anchor batsman of the opponents. 

I felt like I let my captain down and breached his trust. The soft-spoken captain came to me and asked me to forget and remain on the field and asked me to patrol the point and gully area as no one else was better than me. After that I saved few more boundaries. 

After I dropped the catch, I was booed by the crowd, for the first and probably the last time. The bowler gave me earful. 

The dropped catch kept on haunting because that bowler remained never allowed anyone to forget it throughout the match, despite the captain asking him to calm down. 

I was a player in the team, who was not only a performer, but also close to almost everyone in the team. The kind of arrogance the bowler showed against me didn't went well with entire team  As a result, the morale of the team went down, more due to the attitude of the bowler than my dropped catch. As a consequence, the team started feeling the heat. We dropped few more catches, not me thou, misfields happened by few safe fielders. We lost the game handsomely.

It was a bad day, and adding to it was another incident when I, my captain and one more batsman from my team missed the train. Since the frequency of evening return trains were pathetic those days, we decided to walk back 11 kilometres. My captain could have catched the train, but he gave up, to stay with two of the players who were left.

The captain was not the greatest of the players, sometimes too soft to handle the team. However, one particular quality I learned from him was, not to put the team members in pressure after they commit a mistake on the field, because he thought, putting pressure then on them may result in few more mistakes. Team used to play for him and followed his orders, despite him being not with the most popular choices of decisions.

One thing he lacked thou, and as a leader, I learned not to repeat his mistake, was his inability to protect his team from others. He allowed the arrogant bowler to destroy the morale of the entire team over one incident. The bowler didn't understood the momentousness of the occasion on the field. I am not arguing that the result of that match would have been any different, but I am sure we would have up a fight at least. You always have better chances with upbeat morale than dropped shoulders.

The incident is etched in my heart as a lesson. It took quite a few weeks and quite a few performances on the field as a fielder, to recover. However, the incident has definitely added to my leadership skills.

You lead a team, and sometimes team members make genuine mistakes. You have drawing board to correct from preventing those mistakes but definitely not during the ongoing process. Accept the mistakes and work towards correction as a team. Needless pressure will make that member as well as others to falter and  worst of all, not share the issues with you. 

I remained top player in the side and one of the safest fielders, patrolling the boundaries and securing the slips and covers and points. And my learning continued.