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Season of rebellious renaissance

Posted on the August 30th, 2007 under Uncategorized by premub

    Update 1

  

This is the season of flavours. Of unexpected hits and weary misses that is.
It is nothing intriguing that the coachless-wonder christened Team India is struggling,  but it is surprising that it beat English conditions and a better cohesive unit to bag the Test series. It went back to the cocoon of injuries and ailments to gift the lead in ODIs to the Englishmen.

This is actually no mean fete.No one among the billion pundits of the game back home would have expected a better show from a battered side, other than those clamouring on juxtaposing national pride with a game which would have been long back made the national game.

Sad, that hockey still carries the burden of hope, after being swept away by the challenges thrown up by astroturf — the need to keep fit and to change the skillsets.Hockey’s waning clout and cricket’s emergence from the Mumbai’s cramped bylanes to international spotlight happened almost simultaneously.

India’s last major tournament win was the Moscow Olympics in 1980, five years after astroturf was rolled in to topple the skilled fortunes of players from the subcontinent. Indian cricketers poured champagne on the World Cup in 1983 and the media pyrotechnics associated with the euphoria unleashed a fiery rage which strangled all other sport in the bud and buried hockey alive in the years to come.

No tears were left to script a requiem for a hockey as a sport, since a rout from centre-stage wasn’t digestible to the self-proclaimed sports lovers.Benefit of doubt was always a cricketing term which never found a place in hockey parlance.

(Update 1)   

But if you thought a celluloid-inspired revival of hockey is on the cards, good luck. But reel magic seldom translates to turf glory. It can ignite only the box office.  When martyrs were being readied after the world cup shocker, the ghosts of Kerry Packer returned in a desi avatar – the Essel group promoted Indian Cricket League. ICL is spot on in timing. How it unfolds is for time to tell.

But though the BCCI’s coffers as well as odds are stacked in favour of the established frailties of Indian cricket, ICL offers a scent of rebellious renaissance.   It is difficult for hockey to pass the test of Indian television viewers’ appeal, simply because it fails to ignite frenzy. No hockey-playing nations have witnessed frenzy associated with football or cricket.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India, or lack of it, erred in its knee-jerk responses and half-baked pay hikes as a counter measure to the ICL. It wasn’t leading, but following on. That gave ICL an initial lee-way. Converting that into goodwill, eyeballs, sponsorship rights and mass appeal is the job of marketing mavens. Worthy rebels always get a sympathetic and patient hearing.

That is why an emotional Hayanvi jat named Kapil Dev Ram Lal Nikhanj would easily beat the shrewd Sunil Manohar Gavaskar as the most popular cricketer in any poll. Popularity matters. Sharadraoji Pawar would not have to summon his zombie BCCI colleagues to Baramati to tell that tale. 
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How we lost the turf war