A Dramatic January

Prem Panicker
January 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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A Calculated Leak, Pigeon Poop And Smog: No End Of Drama For Indian Sports

If you are a multi-sport person, January has an abundance of riches.

The battle for top honours between newly-minted FIDE world champion D Gukesh and grandmaster R Praggnanandhaa is heating up at the halfway stage of the Tata Steel Masters 2025. (Round five produced piquant interest because Gukesh, needing a win to close the gap with tournament leader Pragg, went up against Vincent Keymer, who was his second during the recent world chess championship and who, thus, knows Gukesh's game inside out. PS: Gukesh won.)

In football, the UEFA Champions League is headlined by Manchester United's implosion, and the Indian Soccer League, both providing riches albeit at widely different levels of skill. The year's first Grand Slam, the Australian Open is into its last leg with Ben Shelton, Jannik Sinner, Alexander Zverev and the ageless Novak Djokovic about to square off in the semifinals. (The equally ageless Rohan Bopanna, now 44, and partner Shuai Zhang unfortunately fell at the quarterfinal stage.) In badminton, Lakshya Sen keeps the Indian flag flying at the Indonesian Masters, the year's first Grand Prix Gold event, with PV Sindhu crashing out in the first round. The Hockey India League is heading into its final stretch, in both the men's and women's segments.

What Were You Playing For?

Going strictly by column inches in the media, you would be forgiven for thinking, though, that there is only one sport being played in India just now — to wit, a random five-game T20 series between India and England, to be followed by three ODIs between the same sides.

Much of the coverage centres around the "new look" England under coach Brendan McCullum, who has just added white ball responsibilities to his ongoing stint as coach of England's red ball team. This is billed as a clash between an Indian team that played with "intent" to win the T20 World Cup last year versus an England under the "Bazball" coach that promises to play with even greater "intent".

Intent is within quotation marks for a reason — see, I don't get it.

What is this "intent" everyone keeps waffling about? The intent to score runs? What's the big deal — isn't that the purpose of cricket, particularly of its most compressed form?

Top players talk of the two mindsets that apply when playing Test cricket versus T20. In the former, the batsman's approach to each ball is "leave, defend, 1, 2, 3, 4" -- that is, leave all you can; if you must, defend; if you can, look for the single to turn the strike over, and if you can do it without risk, play the more aggressive shots that can get you twos, threes, fours. Against that, in T20, the thinking is each team gets only 120 deliveries to maximize runs. Given that, the dot ball is anathema -- the batsman's approach, particularly given the short boundaries in vogue in the format, is 6-4-3-2-1-defend-leave.

So when a team says it has decided to bat with "intent" — that it is looking to maximise run-scoring off every single ball, it begs the question somewhat: before this epiphany, just what were you playing for when you played T20s? A draw?

As you've probably guessed from my vehemence above, this is a pet peeve — this tendency to gush, to dress up the ordinary in column inches of hyperbole. This impacts negatively on the fan's understanding of the game and creates a coterie of adrenalin-fueled supporters whose reaction to victory is jingoism, and to defeat is vicious trolling. Or maybe I am feeling particularly dyspeptic today.

A Calculated Leak?

Moving on to more amusing matters, the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India continues to provide fodder for wry laughter. Remember the hoo-haa of recent times, centred on the BCCI's 10-point guidelines issued to the national team? Remember how this was supposed to be the board "cracking the whip" on the team's superstars, in a bid to end the star culture I'd written about in the previous episode of Playbook? Turns out it is no such thing — the board has not officially put out those guidelines under its imprimatur; what you see in the public domain is a calculated leak.

The intent is to make it appear as if the board was getting tough with the players contracted by it, without actually doing anything. Captain Rohit Sharma called this out during a press conference a week ago when asked about the new guidelines, he responded with: What new guidelines? Where did you see this? Has the board put it out officially? (The implicit answer, of course, is "no".)

In any case, Sharma said, the players were unhappy with the guidelines, always assuming they actually existed. And so it begins — the pushback by the stars, which will result eventually in the sub rosa rollback of all these "tough measures".

Why? Because cricket is about money — and it is the stars that attract big money to the BCCI coffers, not the administrators or even the coach.

Nothing new to see here, move on folks. Oh, and before moving on, read this piece on the new guidelines by the excellent Sharda Ugra -- it is a closer look at the theatre of the absurd that is the Indian cricket administration.

Of Pigeon Poo And Smog

Anyway, there is no shortage of action and drama in the world of sport. And yet, in all of this, what caught my attention was the Indian Open badminton championship that ended on 19 January with the legendary Viktor Axelsen winning the men's finals and South Korean badminton star An Se-Young, winner of the gold at the 2024 Summer Olympics, taking the women's title.

Well as they played, my attention was captured by on-court incidents the day before the final. On her Instagram page, Denmark's badminton star Mia Blichfeldt wrote about why she was forced to pull out in the middle of a game, and abruptly exit from the tournament. "Finally home after a long and stressful week in India," she wrote, detailing how this is the second year in a row she has fallen ill while playing the India Open.

She spoke of the difficulty of training and playing in stifling smog and of pigeons crapping on the courts. "These conditions are unhealthy and unacceptable," she wrote.

Blichfeldt was not the only one — one of the top-ranked doubles teams at the India Open paused in mid-game when pigeon poop came down on their side of the court.

India — or more accurately, the Indian establishment — has talked up its sporting ambitions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on record saying India intends to mount a serious bid for the 2036 Olympics and to host it in Ahmedabad.

Bidding for the Olympics is one thing, the final toll on the exchequer is something else again. A University of Oxford study from 2024 estimated that the average cost of hosting an Olympics is now around triple the bid price; cost escalation leading to mounting debt incurred by the host country has led to cities withdrawing their bids to host the Games.

The cost versus benefit calculus of hosting the games in India is a subject for a deeper dive another day — for now, the question that pigeon poop on badminton courts leaves us with is this: Should India even nurse ambitions to become a sports superpower (assuming that merely hosting the games, rather than placing high on the medals tally, does confer such superpower on the host nation) when it cannot even manage to maintain the infrastructure it already possesses?

A previous edition of Playbook looked at the development of chess in Tamil Nadu and made the age-old argument in favour of infrastructure creation: Build it, and they will come.

Pigeon poop reminds us that the converse is equally true: Neglect it, and they will go.

See you next fortnight — stay safe.

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