The Hindu : Sport : Cricket's generosity must have meaning

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 12, 2006

Sport

Sport

Cricket's generosity must have meaning

A committee with men of honest calibre and sporting intellect must manage the fund, writes Rohit Brijnath

Indian sport has a penchant for generating more cynics than champions. So when the BCCI announces a fund of Rs. 50 crore for developing youngsters in other sports, our antennae of scepticism starts quivering wildly.

Soon enough BCCI's Pawar will hand Indian Olympic Association chief Kalmadi an oversized cardboard cheque. Both men will preen for whirring cameras. Suited officials delirious at the idea of another junket will thunder `we will produce Olympic medallists'. Meanwhile the money becomes just another drop in an ocean of sporting waste.

But, wait, hold on, let's for once strip away the pessimism, let's bury the doubt, Fact is, cricket's gift is unique, a sizeable expression of goodwill that's surprised us.

Envy, but don't blame

Cricket is to be envied but it owes no responsibility to other sports, and suggestions it has sucked the life out of them is the lazy argument of sports officials with a Ph.D. in sloth. Disparities between sports in popularity is not an Indian invention, but a global reality. Argentine hockey players scarcely receive the adulation, and dollars, reserved for its football heroes.

Cricket is hardly to blame for Leander Paes, who's played just three singles matches on the ATP circuit in four-and-a-half years, having to revive a creaking body and strain rusted skills to rescue us even now in the Davis Cup.

Through some strange alchemy of families with fortitude and the kiss of circumstance, Indian tennis has thrown up players every generation — Ramanathan Krishnan, Jaideep Mukherjea, Vijay Amritraj, Ramesh Krishnan, Paes — yet abruptly production has ceased. Since 1990, when Paes arrived, no other male singles player of top 100 merit has emerged. It is this sort of famine that cricket attempts to help break.

Maybe, as Roger Federer does, cricket can start by simply preaching the virtues of sport, through advertisements, seminars, school workshops, getting an oily-food-eating, weekend-TV-watching, homework-burdened generation to see the benefits of good health and the value of discipline and teamwork. It's a culture we could do with.

If cricket seriously wants to assist gifted youngsters, then for its gesture to be meaningful it must go further. Sports federations who fantasise about such handouts will whip out begging bowls and produce a laundry list of deserving athletes despite being awash in mediocrity. For cricket to hand over a cheque and walk away will be nothing but a fuelling of the status quo.

If its act of generosity is unusual, so must be cricket's approach. It cannot rely only on the word of federations, for too many undeserving `uncle's friend's second cousin's sons' slip into teams here and there. Talent must be the only barometer here.

It means cricket must invest in a committee to manage this fund, but staff it with men of honest calibre and sporting intellect, a Padukone, a Gopi Chand, a Shastri, a Krishnan. We own expertise, so let's use it. Pay them, too, for honorary positions are an Indian anachronism.

If a federation submits a youngster's name (preferably 12-13 years old, not 14-15), then the committee must look beyond the blandness of a bio-data. The athlete must be interviewed, for no printed-paper can reveal a Paes-like desire or a kid's desperate dream.

With a network of specialists on speed dial, the committee must then call an athletics expert, a tennis authority, and ask, is this kid the real deal? If the answer is yes, then give him or her equipment, tickets, coaches, the world. But attach to every cheque two words that have been banished from our sporting lexicon: monitoring and accountability.

It would be a start, a professional beginning, and who knows, maybe even cricket could learn from this.

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