Column

First cricket, then hockey, now shooting. Our sports bodies have been in the news one after another. And all for the wrong reasons.
The Delhi Cricket Association was shown up for its complete ineptitude when the Sri Lanka One Day international was abandoned because of a terrible pitch.

Hockey, was for once on the front page instead of cricket, but only because the whole Indian team (supported by the B team) went on strike. And now Abhinav Bindra, our only individual Olympic gold medalist ever, wants to quit because of the attitude of the National Rifle Association of India. This reconfirms an old truth: the trouble with Indian sports is not its sportsmen, it’s the administrators.

Until now, cricket seemed to be the only exception to the rule. But that was only on the surface; anyone familiar with the working of the game knew that it was only the dazzle of money which blinded people to the rotten state of the game. Until now, the Indian Cricket Board made money, lots of it, and shared a tiny portion of it only with its star players. Only recently have players at a slightly lower level, the Ranji Trophy, begun to get fair reward for slogging it out on a cricket ground for hours and hours over years and years.

But the game of cricket, or for that matter any game, isn’t just about the players who make a mark on the game. There are many other constituents which are equally important, but because they are largely in the background, they are neglected.

Take the amount of money spent on training in the richest sport in the country. We now have a few good cricket academies, but it took a sponsor (MRF), to support the first one, which resulted in India producing a steady stream of pace bowlers. It wasn’t the Cricket Board which put in the money. Even now a miniscule amount is spent on the game’s development, and it’s basic commonsense that the more money you spend at the grass-roots, the better it will be for the game.

Speaking of grass-roots, whose responsibility is it to produce pitches which will help India raise its game so that it becomes the world number one not just in the revenues it raises, but in all forms of the game?

The other sports are worse off because they are much poorer. Yes you have people like the ‘Loin of Punjab’ KPS Gill, unwilling to give up the reins of office because they get a chance to live out childhood fantasies of taking part in the game as well as adult fantasies of wielding power over people who have more talent in their little finger than they will have all over their paunchy frame.

Is there a solution? There doesn’t seem to be an easy one. If cricket ceded any ground to cricketers, it was only because sterling cricketers like Bishan Singh Bedi and Sunil Gavaskar had the guts to take on the administration, much like the present hockey team has done. But that’s hardly a lasting solution. Prakash Padukone had started a parallel badminton body, but realised that sportsmen don’t have the stomach to be sports administrators. Who can blame him?

The people who have the stomach for it are politicians like Gill and Jaitley and Sharad Pawar who heads our cricket board (while his own Agricultural ministry plumbs the depths). But what worked against the terrorists of Punjab doesn’t necessarily work for the hockey players of India, and the gift of the gab and his lawyer’s acumen might work for Jaitley in Parliament and the courts, but is it of any use in producing 22 yards of good turf?

Isn’t it time to think long term? We have professional courses in marketing and in media. We have specialised training for hospital administrators too. Why not think of courses in sports administration where the first criterion for selection will be a love of the game and the second managerial-cum-entrepreneurial ability?