The Hindu : Sport : Can money alone make champions?

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Wednesday, Nov 01, 2006
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Can money alone make champions?

A money-centric approach to producing champions will only infantilise our perspective, writes Nirmal Shekar

Like a brave sliver of sunlight piercing a thick canopy of Siberian winter fog, at last a precious nugget of truth has courageously sliced its way through the layer upon layer of hype that manages to hide the real face of Indian cricket from us for the most part.

In an age of boosterism and saturation coverage of a sport that is almost a religion in this country, truth tellers are not easy to come by. And, it is for this reason that Dilip Vengsarkar, Chairman of the BCCI's National Selection Committee, must be applauded for his courage and unblinking honesty.

"To be honest, India doesn't have exceptional talent now," Vengsarkar told pressmen after chairing a meeting to select the Indian team for the ODI series in South Africa.

Dearth of replacements

To be sure, Vengsarkar was not talking about the team that crashed out of the Champions Trophy, one that appeared to betray an all-too-familiar fear of success. Instead, the Selection Committee Chairman was alluding to the fact that it was hard to find replacements from the talent available in domestic cricket.

"There are good first class players. But they are not up to international class," said Vengsarkar.

But, isn't that strange? Isn't it odd that the richest national cricket body (BCCI), one whose income for the financial year 2005-2006 was approximately Rs. 250 crores, should be struggling to find talented young international class players to replace the ageing or injured or non-performing stars?

Even if you were not susceptible to cola-inspired xenophobia — a deadly virus that invades grey matter and stands in the way of civilised enjoyment of a great sport — even if you were level-headed enough to have ignored the sound bytes and the eye candy on offer, even if you stubbornly refused to join the Lalit Modi camp where commodification of sport and sportsmen is the magic mantra, you'd still have to accept that the BCCI is the one big shaker and mover in world cricket today.

Yet, at a time when a shining India has quickly plummeted to metamorphose as whining India on the cricket fields, an honourable man has been forced to throw up his hands in desperation while seeking to get urgent repairs done.

All about big bucks

So, what went wrong? Weren't we told — or, at least led to believe — that it was all about big bucks? Weren't we told that Indian sportsmen failed to match the best in the world because they lacked financial support at a critical stage in their development as athletes?

But, then, our current experience in cricket flies in the face of this logic, doesn't it? If all the BCCI's millions in surplus income failed to produce high quality bench strength for the national side, then what do we do to find champion cricketers?

In the event, the question is this: can money alone make a champion? Can impressive numbers in the right columns in the BCCI balance sheet be translated into equally impressive numbers in terms of talented players queuing up to replace legends such as Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble when the time to do that comes?

Wimbledon example

In the last quarter of a century, from the early 1980s — not long after the start of the commercial boom in international tennis — the Wimbledon lawn tennis championship has pumped more money into the development of British tennis at the grassroots level than the BCCI has earned in its entire history. Yet, Britain has not had a player in the men's singles final at Wimbledon since Bunny Austin in 1938.

If money alone could make champions, Britain would have had more Wimbledon champions than Sweden, Germany and Switzerland put together in the last 25 years.

The same is true of English football. If money — and the game's popularity — mattered more than anything else, then England should have won at least three of the last five World Cups.

More than 50 years ago, an upright gentleman used to ride dozens of miles on his old AJS motorcycle — his young son seated in the rear with a wooden racquet tucked under his arm — to tennis tournaments in obscure towns in south Tamil Nadu.

No complaints

The late T.K. Ramanathan wasn't complaining about his unimpressive bank balance. Nor was Ramanathan Krishnan, the greatest Indian tennis player of all time, too worried about the frequent absence of basic facilities at tournament venues.

Fast forward half a century and ponder this question: how healthy is the West Indies Cricket Board's balance sheet? where did the Bravos and Chanderpauls come from?

The point is, too often money plus popular appeal — which is money's principal source — is equated with success in sport. But, going by the health of English football and tennis and Indian cricket, this equation does not seem to be backed by adequate empirical evidence.

When it comes to the question of what it takes to produce champions, this approach — at once reductionistic and disingenuous — will only infantilise our perspective.

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