ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Can We Please Not Give A Damn About Cricket?

At Kuala Lumpur's recent Commonwealth Games, we won 25 medals. That included 7 of the gold variety, 10 silver and 8 bronze. Our hockey team played the best it has in recent memory in narrowly missing a bronze. The badminton team performed splendidly. Even if the Commonwealth Games are not exactly the Olympics, and without meaning to imply Kuala Lumpur '98 heralds some kind of revival of Indian sports, this was certainly the best Indian performance at a large international sports meet in many years.

Yet what dominates discussion about the Commonwealth Games in India? Why our cricket team played so badly. Whether they had deliberately played that way so they would not reach the medal round and the top stars could then take a flight to play the more lucrative one-dayers in Toronto. Whether that flight had already been planned before the KL games.

Cricket shenanigans, in short. Cricket shenanigans of painfully little consequence, but they are debated anyway.

Lost in all that were the stellar performances from some other Indians who were also in KL. Partly because it is the first game I remember playing with any seriousness, partly because it is such a delightful game, I was particularly thrilled with the badminton display the Indians put on. In the team competitions, the men took home a silver medal, the women a bronze. The top Indian man, P Gopi Chand, won an individual bronze.

But best of all was a young lady from Bombay called Aparna Popat. After leading the Indian women to the team bronze, she won a silver for herself in the individual event. She fought hard in the final; on another day, she might even have pulled out the victory. Still, a silver is no small achievement.

Popat is ranked 24th in the world. To put that in some perspective, think of this: this week, Steffi Graf is ranked 22nd in women's tennis. Popat is head and shoulders above her Indian colleagues. To me it seems just possible that she has it in her to rise much, much higher in the world of badminton: this silver medal may just be the spur she needs to take her there. I hope she manages it.

These, and some more, were the moments to savour for India at the Commonwealth Games. Yet they were nearly drowned out by the cricket news. And to what end? Still more one-day cricket matches that I feel sure you have already forgotten.

Even though I love the game, this is what bugs me about cricket, at least as India plays it today. We make such an enormous fuss over matches that we have to struggle to remember even a day or two later; and yet it is fuss on that scale that has made it difficult for every other sport to survive in India.

Consider what went on with the recent matches we played. After the debate on Commonwealth versus Toronto, we focused on how badly India played in Toronto. The hand-wringing over the 4-1 defeat there, not least because it was to Pakistan, was so intense that Mohammed Azharuddin made it to The Times of India's editorial page to tell the country what went wrong. (And here I am, trying for months to get on that page with no success at all).

This is not unusual in the least. Let India lose two inconsequential one-day matches in a row, sometimes even just one, and a frenzied flagellation takes over: mourning our declining fortunes, our insipid players and their lackadaisical spirit. In Toronto, we lost four in succession: there's no way we could have sidestepped the flagellation.

But then, one victory is all that's needed to transform mourning into hosannas. Indeed, that's what we got. Only days after the "Sahara Cup debacle", India "returned to their winning ways" in Bulawayo in a "superb manner". It was just one match, won against Zimbabwe, that produced that kind of overblown rhetoric from an Ashish Shukla, writing in The Times of India. One match. I'm almost thankful we also won the second match against Zimbabwe, as I wrote these very words. If we had lost it, who knows to what depths of depression Shukla would have sunk, carrying us there as well.

It is not simply our infatuation with cricket that makes us treat our other sports so shabbily. It is also a strange inability to look at the cricket we play with some perspective. Especially with one-day matches, we'll win some today, we'll lose some tomorrow. That's the way the game is. One match lost, or even four in a row, cannot by any means constitute a "debacle". In the same way, one match won cannot stand for a "return to winning ways."

That we rarely can remember further back than the last two or three one-day matches India has played should tell us just how much they really mean. But that does not prevent us riding a roller-coaster as the games go by in a meaningless blur.

The point I'm making: if we were able to lend half as much emotion as we do to cricket to the other sports India plays, I think we might do substantially better in them.

Take hockey. While it is certainly true that India's decline from some truly rarefied heights in the game has had a lot to do with its present unpopularity, it also works the other way around. I remember being part of a packed University Stadium for a match in the Aga Khan tournament in the mid-1970s. These days, I often pass that very same stadium and see some of India's finest players playing their matches before utterly empty stands.

(Can you imagine Tendulkar playing any kind of cricket anywhere in Bombay without a crowd around him?) With that kind of public interest and support, it's a wonder our hockey team was even a contender for a bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games. Think about it: why should any sponsor pay good money for a sport nobody cares to watch? Why should a young athlete choose to play hockey if there's no money in it?

This is why Aparna Popat's badminton success is so encouraging. She has played her game, moved up to #24 in the world, even won a tournament in France recently, and now has this silver medal in her bag -- all with minimal fan support or recognition. (Would you recognise her if you saw her on the street?). Where might she reach if she had that support? Where might our Indian badminton teams, not overly lacking in talent, reach? What if even just a stadium-load of Bombayites cared enough about hockey to fill the stands for matches played here?

Sponsors would immediately take an interest in such matches. Over time, there might even be enough money in hockey to draw substantial new talent into the game. Perhaps even enough to make us world contenders once more.

Dreams, I know. But this Commonwealth Games persuaded me: they may not be entirely futile dreams. Despite extreme levels of vile politicking, despite poor treatment of our sportsmen, despite shabby facilities, there are still a few bright spots in Indian sport. On the evidence of KL alone, we have world class weight-lifters, shooters, badminton players. And a hockey team that may be showing signs of turning a big corner. It's too bad all that gets blacked out by meaningless, forgettable cricket in Toronto. It's too bad we care so much about meaningless cricket in Toronto.

In fact, it's too bad we play so much meaningless cricket.

How Readers responded to Dilip D'Souza's columns

Dilip D'Souza