Sports
Growth of cricket in Andhra phenomenal (Column: Just Sport)
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By Veturi Srivatsa The technical committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in India
(BCCI) meets at the end of each season to hear out coaches and captains
of Ranji Trophy teams on the ills of domestic cricket. A lot of noise is
made on scheduling of matches, quality of pitches and balls and the
standard of umpiring.
The people attending the meeting may change
with new captains and coaches coming in, but the issues remain more or
less the same every year. A video recording of one meeting can as well
be replayed every time the committee meets because the same issues are
raised again and again without an action plan or the redressal
mechanism.
If there is one issue which does not crop up these
days is the quality of infrastructure. Most state associations utilise
the board’s subsidy fully for construction of stadiums, some raising
state-of-the-art facilities. There are others, mercifully not many,
whose subsidies have evaporate in thin air.
One can understand
the politicians being careless with money but sadly former India
cricketers, too, are charged with large-scale financial irregularities.
The
buzz word in Indian cricket these days is “conflict of interest",
thanks to the Indian Premier League (IPL). Almost all the icons of
Indian cricket are involved with some franchise or the other as mentors,
coaches, advisers et al and at the same time they are also holding some
official position in the board.
For instance people who accuse
Anil Kumble of getting involved with Mumbai Indians when he is also the
chairman of the board’s technical committee forget the kind of work he
and Javagal Srinath did as president and secretary of the Karnataka
Cricket Association.
The kind of infrastructure they have
created in the state is a testimony to their impressive work. No wonder
they could not survive for long, the schemy old sharks are back in the
saddle.
Talking of infrastructure, the Hyderabad, Andhra,
Himachal Pradesh and Vidarbha associations have used the board’s subsidy
to construct stadiums of aesthetic beauty as well as provide fantastic
facilities.
They have spacious dressing rooms, spectator comfort
both inside and outside the stadiums and importantly, parking space for
people driving in from far-off places. Mind you these facilities have
come up not in metros or big cities.
Chinnaswamy Stadium,
Chidambaram Stadium and the newly-named Inderjit Singh Bindra Stadium,
can be templates for others. The Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium is
another that has kept cricket at heart. Here the media can have an
ideal view and what’s more the scribes get parking stickers with the
accreditation.
The association which is in the process of
building an ultra-modern stadium is the Andhra Cricket Association (ACA)
at Mangalagiri to add to their scenic Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy (YSRR)
Stadium in Visakhapatnam.
The ambience and backdrop of the YSRR
Stadium at Pothenamallayya Palem is as picturesque as the one at
Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. The Rajiv Gandhu Stadium at Uppal in the
neighbouring Telangana state had come in for praise from Sachin
Tendulkar for its spacious dressing rooms.
The Andhra association
has done much more. It has persuaded former India wicketkeeper Mannava
Sri Kanth Prasad to quit as an executive in a flourishing public sector
unit to take over virtually as CEO, though he prefers to be called
Director, Cricket Operations.
The association has the
multi-faceted Gokaraju Gangaraju as its secretary. Raju, who played
inter-university cricket when it was something to be talked about, goes
out of his way to help cricketers in the state. It disburses Rs.75 lakh
per annum as stipend to players.
Gangaraju, a self-made
industrialist, says an indoor stadium with 10 pitches with natural
light as well as flood-lights at Mangalagiri is almost complete and it
is going to be ACA’s showpiece facility.
The association has
three academies for boys and and another exclusively for girls. The
board has made the girls academy as its training headquarters for
women’s cricket, a la the National Cricket Academy.
The trainees
get free, board, lodging and education in reputed schools as a backup in
case someone doesn’t measure up to the cricket standards. Each academy
has three coaches of different levels, a trainer and a physio and
preferably a couple to manage the affairs as administrative manager and
warden.
Gangaraju has also gone to the grassroots level by
investing Rs.15 lakh in each of the 13 districts for unearthing talent.
Prasad roped in former India international Mohammad Kaif to mentor the
youngsters and lead the state team.
Still, he says, the ACA shows
some Rs.60 crore surplus in its books when most association who hold
Test and international matches are perennially in the red.
The
outcome of all this is incredible. The state has achieved something that
no other association has done in the 2014-15 season by entering the
all-India knockout in the Under-16, Under-19, Under-23, Ranji Trophy and
the T-20 tournaments. The women’s team won the Plate championship and
the Under-16 girls, the zonal championship.
The nearest
comparison to Andhra could be Rajasthan when Lalit Modi was at its helm.
He had worked out similar facilities and encouragement to players. The
result was that Rajasthan for the first time won the Ranji Trophy not
once but twice in succession.
Now board politics has left the
state association in turmoil and cricket is suffering. There is no doubt
there is too much of cricket in the country, but no one wants to think
of regulating it by tweaking the domestic calendar. That can a topic for
discussion another day.
Veturi Srivatsa is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])