The Hindu : Players' concerns should not be brushed aside

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 08, 2004

Sport

Sport - Cricket

Players' concerns should not be brushed aside

By Nirmal Shekar

There are times when we choose to hear only what we want to hear. There are times when we choose to see only what we want to see. There are times when we are told only what we want to be told. In the context of Indian cricket, this may be such a time.

For some time now, over the last few weeks, even as cricket fans, officials, former players and everybody who has anything to do with the nation's favourite sporting religion has ridden a rollercoaster, emotionally, with Sourav Ganguly's boys Down Under, an issue of enormous significance which has agitated the minds of the Indian players has been conveniently swept under the carpet.

Obviously, quite a few senior members of Ganguly's team have tossed and turned in their hotel beds in Hobart and Perth and Melbourne thinking not so much about the white ball coming out of Brett Lee's right hand the following afternoon as about a historic voyage they might have to undertake in a few weeks' time.

From time to time, of course, the odd report has appeared about the reservations expressed by a few players regarding the much-talked-about tour of Pakistan in early March. But little has been done to examine how serious those concerns were. Some of us might have even wanted to laugh them off. Concerns? What concerns?

After all, everything is fine on the LoC. We have seen immaculately uniformed men break into smiles and exchange sweets on the Wagah border, heard of Bollywood producers and their Pakistani counterparts talk of joint-venture films and delegations after delegations flying back and forth from Delhi and Islamabad.

It has always been thus. When it comes to India and Pakistan and everything the South Asian neighbours share — including periodic love and hate and cricket and what-have-you — most of us tend to inhabit extremes at the emotional level. From everything-is-wrong to everything-is-right is but a cordial hotline phone call away.

While we might not want to delve deeper into that phenomenon and may well choose to leave it to political analysts and erudite academics, there is no getting away from the fact that sport (read cricket in this context) is very much a part of the larger system and cannot hope to insulate itself and remain an island.

This is precisely why cricket _ as big as it is in both countries _ has been forced on to the centre-stage even as the two countries strive for peace and normalcy on all fronts. And it is because of cricket's extraordinary popularity that its finest practitioners will have to front the march towards normalisation of relations.

It is also part of the distressing dynamics of India-Pakistan ties that quite often in the past cricket was the first victim when something went slightly wrong between the two nations. And those of us who understand the peculiar dynamics of the India-Pakistan equation will not at all be surprised by the latest developments.

Yet, the question now is less about such emotional extremes and more about how seriously the Government and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) weigh the concerns that may have been expressed _ directly or indirectly _ by the Indian players regarding the security aspects of the tour.

Day after day after day we hear Pakistani politicians and board officials assure us that the level of security that will be in place for the Indian team will match what was put on for the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was in Pakistan for the SAARC summit.

But, then, the question is this: it is possible to provide such VVIP level security to sportsmen at hotels and on public roads and, more importantly, on the grounds where they play?

It might take just a solitary deranged man or a fanatic with a total disregard for his own life to throw mud on the face of the entire security apparatus and pose a serious threat to the Indian team. This is precisely why it is irrelevant that a vast majority of the cricket loving public in Pakistan is willing to welcome the Indian players with open arms.

Platitudinous clichés about sport being a bridge to peace are equally irrelevant at this critical moment. For, the truth is, sport, for all its influence and power, is still not in any position to determine the course of politics in the nations of the world and continues to be a rather vulnerable sub-system.

In the event, this is a time when we need to be guided by a serious assessment of ground realities rather than — like the avaricious marketing men on either side of the border — allow ourselves to be carried away by greed. How many millions of rupees the tour will generate is less important than how comfortable our players are — mentally and physically — in undertaking the tour that is being seen as a historic, landmark event.

The three-member BCCI delegation that leaves for Pakistan on January 9 will have to do a lot of hard work on the ground out there. What is more important is for the team to hand in an honest, thoroughly professional assessment of the security aspects.

It is equally important for the BCCI top brass to invite the senior players — on their return from Australia — for a meeting once the three-member team's report is available. The players must be briefed on everything that the delegation has found out.

This apart, players must be given the chance to express their views and their fears, if any, must be individually and professionally addressed by the Board officials.

Finally, on their part, the cricket fans will have to strive to make India-Pakistan cricket matches less emotionally draining for the players by choosing not to read more into the results than there actually might be.

While it might be ludicrous to see an India-Pakistan match as just another ballgame, the fact is — the emotions triggered by the events of history apart — there may not be much more to it than what you might find in any other great rivalry in sport.

After all, what does India's victory over Pakistan in sport — cricket or hockey or whatever — or Pakistan's defeat of India prove? Economic superiority? Cultural superiority? Intellectual superiority?

Nothing as important, really. We share a culture. And we share, too, many of the problems of developing nations. It might be rather more appropriate if we talk of superiority when one or the other of the two countries eradicates poverty and illiteracy and gender inequality rather than when we beat each other at cricket.

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