Well it seems like a misnomer that. Handovers take place between mature individuals. Here Ganguly was acting more like a child holding on to a toy rather than a responsible and mature leader realising his time was up and handing over the reins in a dignified manner.
Well anyway, call it snatching the captaincy from Ganguly and "handing it over" to Dravid. Now, a couple of people in a Yahoo! Groups I visit (sachintendulkarfans@yahoogroups.com) pointed out that this particular "hand-over" was sort of similar to the Taylor-Waugh one or the Hussain-Vaughan one. Of course, Dravid has a lot to prove to be talked of in the same breath as Waugh and Vaughan - but even at this point, certainly there are telling similarities but some major differences.
I would like to consider these 3 on the following parameters -
1) The kind of team inherited: It seems fair to say that Hussain, Taylor and Ganguly had to pretty much build their teams from scratch. Well less so for Taylor than the others. Vaughan, Waugh and Dravid got more settled teams. Again, more so Vaughan than the others - Waugh did not have the best of starts only managing to draw a series in the West Indies and looked in trouble early in the World Cup 99 (remember the losses to NZ and Pakistan and having to win all matches in order to stay in ?) before embarking uponone of the greatest runs in history. Ganguly almost managed to destroy the team he worked so hard to build but then that is to be expected of a little child.
2) Greatness as Individual Performances: Here the similarities are extremely telling. Quite simply, Taylor, Hussain and Ganguly were good players while Waugh, Vaughan and Dravid are/were great ones (well Vaughan has the potential to get there at any rate if some of you don't think he is already there)
3) Cricketing Acumen vs Man-management Abilities: Here there are some differences. Taylor was brilliant - probably the greatest cricketing brain in the last 15 years at least, maybe (just maybe) Waugh was not that great (well he was still pretty great) as a tactician but he shone through with his man-management, leading by example and instiling even harder the virtues of determination, positivisim, discipline and the never-say-die attitude. In the other 2 cases, the situation somewhat reverses. Hussain was a hard task-master. He built a team from a fairly scratchy lot brick by brick and was perhaps not the smartest tactically. Vaughan on the other hand has been quite immaculate with attention to detail as regards field placements, bowling changes etc. and unlike Hussain he is more of "one of the guys" type of leader. Ganguly must be given credit for building the Indian team just like Hussain is for England. He staunchly backed players he had faith in, overall got the optimum off them and gave India a new belief. However when it came to on-field tactics, he was extremely average. So far Dravid has made a positive start with regards to that. He is also coming on well as a leader of men and I think now all the young kids know that he is in charge and respect him for it. Of course, his immaculate individual performances on and off the field help. There are people who wonder if the over-analytical Dravid will be able to face the heat when things start to wrong, whether he will be able to keep the squad together, be able to keep drawing the best out of temperamental players like Harbhajan Singh the way Ganguly did ?? I think he has it in him to overcome any challenge. Of course time will tell
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