THE much-awaited Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) report on “cricket match-fixing and related malpractices” has been finally released and its contents have shown many cricketing idols in very poor light. The only redeeming feature is the clean chit given by the CBI to the greatest allrounder of the country Kapil Dev, who during the entire episode has been the most maligned and traumatised person. His biggest tormentor and detractor, Manoj Prabhakar himself, has been indicted by the investigating agency for his deep involvement in this sordid affair of match-fixing. His has been a classic case of a person committing a theft and shouting himself hoarse for catching the thief.

It may seem an easy thing to write or speak a few words of sympathy for Kapil Dev but can any law of the land bring back his reputation which has been tarnished by the constant battering it received in the media throughout the controversy. His breaking down while defending himself against the malicious insinuations was termed as a sort of cover to gain public sympathy. The country he served so well from the front for over 15 years in the field of cricket started turning a blind eye to all his achievements. Friends and acquaintances did not leave any opportunity to make an unkind and unsavoury comment. It was a great cricketer like Sir Viv Richards who when asked to comment had stated that “Kapil was one cricketer who he had known to have played with pride for his country and who could never compromise the honour of his country by dabbling in the nefarious activities of match-fixing and if ever he was proved otherwise he would lose his faith in mankind. It had always been a great challenge to play against such highly strung and motivated player.”

The report has brought out the nexus between players and bookies and those found guilty may finally get no punishment as the law makers are all at sea about the various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which can be made operative in this biggest fraud played with the honour and psyche of a cricket crazy nation.

One really wonders if this passive nation would ever raise its voice for public condemnation of these culprits who have betrayed the nation’s honour and prestige for monetary gains even if the law in its present form fails to punish the match-fixers. The nation should treat them as outcastes and they should be stripped of all the titles that may have been conferred on them. While condemning the unfortunate happenings one must not lose sight of the fact that all this was allowed to happen right under the nose of the BCCI which has the reputation of being a cash rich and a very well managed sports organisation. It is hard to believe that the administrators at no stage had any inkling of this cancerous disease which as reported now had spread its tentacles the world over during the past five to six years. Should we lay the blame squarely on the players who took the plunge in this murky world of match-fixing or should it be shared by the administrators who failed to sit up and take notice of such clandestine deals even when murmurs in this regard were doing the rounds.

OVER the years the issue of a foreign coach for various Indian teams has been hotly debated. Football of course has availed itself of the services of one or the other foreign national while weightlifting could be said to have benefited (women only) to some extent with the entry of a foreign coach. Athletics these days has engaged one from Ukraine but one wonders, particularly after the aberration in Sydney, a drastic change of heart, if not of a coach, will not take place. But by and large the issue of a foreign coach has remained on the debating stage.

Let us examine first the case of hockey where the debate has started anew and again after another disastrous outing. A foreign coach for Indian hockey sounds a little strange since during India’s golden days, and these were spread over quite a few years, the team was in the hands of Indians only. Not only did Indians train Indians but a number of Indian players were employed by various countries to train their hockey teams. And quite recently, the South Korean hockey coach openly acknowledged the gains from a stint at NIS Patiala and he mentioned former Indian coach Balkishen Singh as the person who influenced him and Korean hockey.

The germ of an idea about the need for a foreign coach, if one remembers, came after Indian hockey began its downward slide. As long as it was winning no one spoke about a foreign coach. Herein lies the problem. The issue would not have risen had India managed to enter the semi-finals at Sydney. They deserved that place and perhaps more. The requirement of a foreign coach is thus related entirely to defeat and not necessarily to improve or change the style of play to combat the onslaught of western influence, as it were.

And it does not make sense, this clamour for foreign coach. And in any case a foreign coach at most will benefit only the national team not the game as played in the country as a whole. What is required is a resurrection of hockey as it was played when popular in the years gone by. Once that enthusiasm and popularity is restored no one will talk about foreign coaches. And why foreign coaches when video clips are available of all of training schedules, matches in the World Cup, Olympics, Asian Games and elsewhere. Our own people at SAI centres can view these clips, show them to the players, and translate them into plans to suit Indian needs.

If Indian players without the benefit of coaching manuals can train teams in the other countries then what is the need for an outsider to come and tell the Indians how to play a game which they used to excel in themselves? By all means get a foreign coach and pay him a handsome amount but first the federation should pause and think whether such a step is necessary. Pakistan for instance had Islahuddin guiding its fortunes for well over a decade. And the team extremely well. There is no reason why India cannot do well with an Indian coach. What is needed is to revive the interest in the game, not just for the sake of winning a medal, but for the sake of a game which India at one stage used to be proud to call it a national sport.

Recently the subject has cropped up in the cricket world too. Here too it is debatable whether the team’s performance will improve with the induction of a foreign mind. Former BCCI president Raj Singh Dungurpur has said that the foreign coaches are computer savvy. One would like to ask him if Javed Miandad is computer savvy or for that matter how much computer savvy was Inteqab Alam who held the centre stage as Pakistan coach for years altogether. Pakistan has not done badly at all. In fact it must be mentioned here that Pakistan cricket and hockey have done well irrespective of the personality and the nationality of the coach.

One can make a case for athletics in particular. It certainly can do with a competent, technical hand. The sport has become very technical these days and perhaps not all the coaches available at home are used to the latest developments. But again it must be emphasised that most of the Indian athletes who have done well did not necessarily have the benefit of a full time foreign coach. P.T. Usha, the best woman athlete of all times depended entirely on the home-spun knowledge of fellow Keralite, Nambiar. Milkha Singh, Gurbachan Singh the two early heroes learned from experience and but despite presence of a few foreign hands at NIS depended entirely on the guidance from Indian coaches. And Sriram Singh was entirely a devotee of Illyas Babar, an ethnic product in all its entirety. Babar in fact was indirectly responsible for the performance of a number of athletes from the Services. Agreed that in the earlier years a number of foreign athletes and coaches came country under the Rajkumari Amrit Kaur scheme and contributed not a little to the improvement of Indian athletics. But the permanent fixture has generally been an Indian. And for most part of the last three decades or more it has been Joginder Singh Saini and K.O. Bosen among others who have been the guide and mentor of some of the top athletes with an occasion foreign element on a visit helping out for fine tuning.

As for football the less said the better. Indian football, despite the many foreign coaches it has paid big money to, remains where it was some two decades ago. No matter how much money has been spent and irrespective of the foreign personalities who have coached the team, Indian football has just not looked up. And imagine in the 50s and in fact till mid-70s, India had one of the best teams in Asia. It was an Indian, Rahim by name, who was mainly responsible for the high profile it had then. Foreign coaches have not helped at all. India continues to be one of the weakest combinations in Asia. Forget the world. It is not event the best team in South Asia where Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have, on occasions, beaten them.

In a nutshell it is not the induction of foreign coaches which will boost Indian sport. Something more is needed. One should look within and if necessary get the help of a psychiatrist to determine the reasons for the continued poor performance. Some years ago a former captain said an Indian cricket team was a multi-nation mixture with players speaking different languages and with varying food habits. And indeed the Indian cricket team is a very different proposition from those of the other countries.

THE emergence of Nitin Kirtane and Rushmi Chakravarthi as the newest national hard court tennis champions in the recently-concluded DSCL Open Championships in Delhi, was no great statement on the quality of tennis talent available in the country. This is not to slight the achievements and competence of the Pune-based Nitin Kirtane and the Chennai-based Rushmi Chakravarthi, as both are seasoned campaigners in the national circuit, and are known for their perseverance and fighting spirit.

Yet, they are no spring chickens, and that they ascended the men’s and women’s thrones without much of sweat and toil, outsmarting younger players, who are supposed to be the future hopes, is a cause for concern as it shows the lack of depth among the new crop of players, and those who have been around for quite some time, threatening to explode, but are still struggling to come out of their ‘marginal’ status.

Nobody expected the fifth-seeded Nitin Kirtane to reach the final, let alone win the title, as there were some young bunch of players in the fray, on whom India’s future hopes supposedly lie, like defending champion Sunil Kumar, top seeded Vijay Kannan, second seeded Vinod Sridhar and eighth-seeded Rishi Sridhar. Yet, none of them could match up to a 26-year-old ‘veteran’ like Nitin when it came to the crunch, thereby fully exposing the hollow quality of talent available in the country at present.

There was a lot of expectation from the 17-year-old Chandigarh colt Sunil Kumar, as after winning the national hard court title at the Delhi Tennis Association court last year, he had been signed up by Paes-En-Sports and had received a lot of foreign exposure during the past 12 months. Yet, when it came to countering Nitin Kirtane’s steady, focussed game, he had no weapons to match. “He gave me no chance” was Sunil’s simplistic reaction.

Even senior selection committee chairman Shyam Minotra was aghast at the pathetic quality of tennis dished out by the youngsters. “We need to drastically alter our coaching methods”, he observed. “We seemed to have been caught in a time warp. We need to go back to the drawing board, and start all over again. The basics of our players seem to be very very dated”, Shyam noted.

He quoted the example of Barcelona, where he had the occasion to watch young boys and girls play at a prominent club, and whose standard, he felt, was far superior to the senior players of India.

Even former All-India Tennis Association (AITA) president Raj Kumar Khanna, before he demitted office recently after a long reign at the top, lamented that the only regret he had while stepping down was that the quality of the players had not improved despite the best efforts of the AITA. He said the base of tennis in the country has widened considerably and there was a lot more tournaments in the country than before, like the Satellites and Challengers, yet the standard had not improved the way the AITA had wanted it to be. There was no tightening of the purse strings, and the AITA has been sparing no effort in providing as much facilities as it could to the talented players. But the results have certainly not been commensurate with the money and efforts it had put in.

Since competition at the national level is not very strong enough, the Davis Cup players give the championship the go-bye, thereby further devaluing the competition. The absence of Davis Cuppers Prahlad Srinath and Syed Fazaluddin was sorely felt in the just-concluded nationals, prompting former Davis Cupper and national champion Nandan Bal to comment that “I don’t count this as a national championship”.

Even Indian Davis Cup team non-playing captain Ramesh Krishnan felt that it’s time the AITA formulated some sort of guidelines to make the top players play in the National Championships. Ramesh observed that the nationals would gain added lustre if players like Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi participated in them, in the process elevating the standard of the competition. Mahesh Bhupathi played in the grass court nationals in 1994 and 1995, lifting the title on both occasions, but has since given the national championships the skip. Syed Fazaluddin played in the grass court nationals last year, and annexed the title. But he chose to skip the hard court nationals this year.

Newly-elected AITA Secretary Anil Khanna, however, said he would make the National Championships a very attractive proposition for the top players, “as we may tag it with the futures tournament so that the top players find it attractive and profitable to play in the nationals”.

Even in the women’s section, there were no major surprises as it was clear that the title contest would be between the first two seeds — Sai Jayalakshmi and Rushmi Chakravarthi. In the new four-game format, any player gaining an early break stands to win the set, and therefore, no player can afford to commit too many mistakes in the women’s section. Young players like Shalini Thakur, Sonal Phadke and Radhika Tulpule are all competent campaigners, but they fumble when it comes to the big points, and the experienced players, who have been in the circuit for long, exploit this vulnerability of the younger lot to the hilt, to lift title after title, which is not very good for the health of Indian tennis, looking at it from a long-term perspective.