Sporting attitudes…

Its been a long hiatus and the great or not so great thing in being an amateur blogger is the idea of not updating the posts at a regular interval. However, there are people, far better equipped to do that for the audience in general, so I needn’t bother too much about my past time activities. In a sense, after India’s unthinkable yet justified early exit from the world cup, I thought its better not to write about something remotely related to cricket.
But, strange as it sounds, the BCCI activities do enrage and force you to vent out the anger within you. Being a small sport enthusiast (I have stopped calling myself a genuine cricket fan) I find the recent BCCI activities hard to digest. As usual, I would be a minority in believing that It would take a miracle for Indian cricket (and indian sports administration, in general) to be run professionally.

The recent fiasco, post Bangladesh series (billed as grudge series – though I seriously don’t know against whom the grudge is), is the selection of national coach. As predicted and assumed, there is a so called expert committee to finalize on the selection of the coach. We have people vouching for Desi coach, players united not to play under an Indian guide (never heard of impressive colonial supremacy like this before, that too from educated people) and then the BCCI to make things confusing as well as opaque to the billion audiences.
Ideal process would have been to properly advertise with required qualification, receive applications and then screen and take interviews or presentations to finally select. Like any big organization keeps its vision, even while going for mass recruitment, the idea behind any standard procedure has been to make things transparent to the stakeholders. The regular actions ensure sensitiveness to the outside audience and stakeholders from the management of the company.
However, that is too much to expect from a company (with billions in its revenue) which refuses to be professional for absolutely known reasons.

Examples of producing excellent results with professional methods are galore. And this is not only in cricket – same is the case with hockey, football or tennis. Sania Mirza finds it hard to get an approval for a foreign coach, no system in place to encourage her except advertisers (who, accidentally are more interested in her screen presence and personality rather than on court activities), footballers get entrapped between club transfer fiasco and hockey players move towards an untimely death.

And its not only the authorizing bodies who are to be blamed. I mean, with such exemplary and fantastic names on the coach selection committee, people would have naturally asked for a more unified and professional approach. Yet, it seems, people inside have different agenda for whatsoever reasons. We have bowling coach (on what basis Mr. Venkatesh Prasad was selected only he knows I guess – with due respect to him), one fielding coach and hopefully would also have a batting coach.
But, I can guarantee the result without going through the entire episode. I bet most of the readers would be able to do that.
We have mastered in creating and nurturing world class silos within teams and organizations, and have been extremely successful in diving society into innumerable castes and sub castes. So, to have a national team representing a private tamasha company with 11 different people having widely different agenda is not a difficult job to accomplish.
I only pray to finish this comedy as soon as it could get. Till then I am eagerly awaiting the final at French open between Federar and Nadal. They are what I called pure and unbridled entertainment.My vote is for Nadal though, on clay court, and obviously for Justin in the women’s singles. Best of luck to the original sports-persons.