Well, if the captain states before the game they are going to play fearlessly and end up gifting away the game, you don't expect the owner to simply sit pretty, do you?
SRH, Punjab,Delhi owners have been vocal in the past regarding their team's failures. KLR is a punching bag cause of his own actions and statements. If he were to back it up, no one would raise their eyebrows.
Again,
none of them have walked out on the field after a game and berated their own captain in full view of everyone and live TV.
I don’t really remember any of those team owners being particularly vocal in the past either (would like to see the examples of such incidents that you’re pointing out) and it’s not a coincidence that two of the three teams you’ve listed haven’t won anything after fifteen seasons of the IPL. I would daresay that the reason Punjab have been playing better in recent times is partly because they’ve started introducing more professionalism into their setup and Delhi have done the same ever since the Jindals became joint owners.
This is the equivalent of the chairman of a company walking down to the common office workspace and berating a team lead in full view for everyone else to see with there being multiple screens for other members of the same company in other offices watching it go down live. Not the most unusual thing that could happen in an Indian work environment but it’s completely unprofessional and everyone would agree that the chairman was being an absolute tool and side with the bloke being berated. Yet somehow KLR is the one receiving further shade in here when even r/cricket has unanimous support for him despite hating the man?
KL could have given us the T20 version of what Gavaskar showed in India’s first WC game and that still doesn’t justify what happened to him. If anyone else was in his shoes I’m completely sure you would be siding with them (unless you’re the chairman in my previous analogy).
There’s a reason why most professional sports organisations don’t really have owners interacting directly with the players on a regular basis
even behind closed doors unless it’s one of the start/end of the season events or a complete crisis event, their first point of contact is with the sporting director or an equivalent and then it’s with the team’s manager or coach.
If Goenka was unhappy with the team’s performance (which is completely justifiable) then the first step he would ideally do is to schedule a meeting for the next day with the team’s manager Pyne, the coach Langer and the director MSK Prasad and discuss what went wrong yesterday, voice out his thoughts (I’m willing to bet he isn’t going to be as argumentative when he’s up against Langer
) and then work on what needs to be done next; if that involves instructing KL to be more media savvy or be more aggressive personally (something that he was doing in the last few games to be fair to him) then he can communicate that here to the staff who can put it across to KL.
But I suppose that’s too much maturity and professionalism to expect out of someone who has renamed three sports teams that I know of after his initials, credits wins to superstitions and higher beliefs whilst putting down the losses to individuals of his team and has a history of doing such clownish acts (he had a similar argument with Gauti on the field last season and I wouldn’t be surprised if amongst other things that influenced the latter to go back to KKR).