No love lost between Chappell (Top) and King

New Delhi: When India take on the West Indies in a series of one-dayers and Tests in the Caribbean beginning next month, a side battle would as well be on between the two coaches ? Greg Chappell and Bennett King.

Chappell, it may be recalled, had been sounded out for the job of coaching the West Indies before King landed in the fray.

Dr Rudi Webster, sports psychologist, who has served West Indian cricket as director of the Shell Cricket Academy (SCA), recently lambasted King for his alleged comments in which the West Indies coach described players of 1970s as “dinosaurs”.

King since then has denied ever making this remark, claiming it was “completely and totally inaccurate, an outright lie.”

It has now surfaced that it was Chappell, who actually attributed the “dinosaur” remark to King during a brief visit to the SCA in Grenada in 2004.

Chappell, now Team India coach, had then expressed his anger over King’s alleged remark, stating that those with little playing background were calling the “players of the 70s as old hat, that we’re dinosaurs, that we’ve got to move on.”

Chappell’s comments were then widely reported in the Caribbean media.

“The reason they’re denigrating the players of the past is to isolate them and keep them out of the argument,” Chappell had then charged.

“They know that if we sat down around a table and debated with them they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Chappell had then used very strong language for “academics and scientists” like King, with “little or no playing experience even at first-class level”, as having “taken over the game”.

“These new methods are not the methods that got us to where we are,” Chappell had said. “They have come in subsequent to the development of most of the players in the present Australian team.”

“Gary Sobers, Viv Richards, Desmond Haynes, all your great players, didn’t know what made them play the cover drive or the hook the way they did but could they ever play them! To try to explain to them the bio-mechanics of it all would just confuse them.”

Ironically, the claim to fame of Ian Frazer, Chappell’s assistant, is that he is a bio-mechanist.

It would appear that Chappell has already prepared the pitch for a confrontation with the West Indian coach much before the series gets underway next month.