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Why this Indian doesn’t want a Melbourne miracle

Why this Indian doesn't want a Melbourne miracle

While all of India is praying for a miracle at Melbourne on Tuesday, one man in a corner of Malad, Mumbai, will be watching with quiet satisfaction if the Australian juggernaut rolls on. As the man who does the number-crunching for Australian coach John Buchanan, Krishna Tunga can claim some small part in the world champions’ success.

So who is Krishna Tunga? Three years ago, he was a wannabe statistician who’d failed the exam because it was in Marathi. His credits till then included modelling, fashion designing and working on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi, but his passion was cricket — specifically, the numbers game.

Then, during the famous Australian tour of India in 2001, he bumped into Buchanan in the lobby of the Taj in Mumbai, and a relationship was born.
What Tunga offered Buchanan was a different way of looking at stats, to get the answer to why a team won or lost. ‘‘In 1998, I started scoring differently, which I later realised was called notational analysis. I still call it ‘script writing’, paying attention to every detail, to cover whatever I can see, to collect as much information as possible — sometimes 200 indicators for each delivery — about that particular game.’’

Even in an age when the Indian coaching staff has a Kiwi, an Australian and a South African, Tunga’s relationship with the Aussies doesn’t go down well with the few who know about it. ‘‘I’ve been called a deshdrohi’’, he admits. ‘‘I am patriotic, but I treat this as strictly professional — I will assist anyone who supports me if there is an interesting offer.’’