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DEAR REDIFF

Old whine, new bottle

Hemant Kenkre

Last year, when I was in Delhi to watch the World Cup league game between India and Sri Lanka, a friend narrated an amusing incident.

It appears that he hailed a three-wheeler and asked to be taken to the Firozeshah Kotla. The driver responded that he didn't know what that was, or where. It's where they play cricket, my friend explained - only to draw a blank from the driver, who appeared to have no idea what that was either.

So then my friend described the route - and enlightenment dawned on the driver. "Oh, you want to go where they play cards?!!!! Why didn't you say so in the first place?", the driver said, and promptly drove my friend to the ground.

I was reminded of this when I read in the media about Delhi District Cricket Association president K K Mehra's letter to J Y Lele, acting secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. All but reprimanding the BCCI and the national selectors for not having included a single cricketer for Delhi in the Indian team to tour Toronto and, later, Pakistan.

"It seems there is a systematic attempt to sideline the DDCA in all cricketing activities," Mehra writes. Apart from the non-inclusion of Delhi players, the DDCA is apparently miffed that the Australian Cricket Board had asked the BCCI not to include Delhi as a venue for any games during the Australian tour of India later this year.

True, the ACB has no business dictating venues to its Indian counterpart, but after witnessing the state of affairs during the World Cup fixture, I must say I don't blame the ACB. What I saw was, in a word, shameful - spectators with legitimate tickets were not allowed to enter the ground, and when they protested they were lathi-charged. The newly constructed press box hung precariously over the ground - so much so that a wag warned mediapersons to catch Jayasuriya's hits before they landed on the press enclosure, for fear that the impact would bring the whole thing crashing down.

Administrators like Mehra need to realise that it is the job of the selectors to pick the best possible team, and that of administrators to give their cricketers the best possible infrastructural support. Delhi is full of stadia and, unlike Bombay, is not space-starved. But what has the DDCA done to improve infrastructure? Nothing. In fact, the body has been in the news more for infighting that is rampant within their ranks.

Mehra in fact needs to ask himself a question - why, given that the Firozeshah Kotla ground is in Delhi, did the BCCI find itself constrained to make the Palam Air Force Ground the venue for the Indian team's practise sessions prior to the departure for Toronto? Surely that speaks volumes - especially when read with the ACB request?

Ask any Bombay cricketer, he will tell you the two teams he respects most are Delhi and Karnataka - in that order. For long, cricketers from Delhi have dominated the Indian arena. BIshen Bedi, Mohinder Amarnath, Chetan Chauhan, Kirti Azad, Rakesh Shukla, Manoj Prabhakar, Surinder Khanna and others played like titans on the domestic circuit and at times, the Delhi squad looked invincible.

Take a look at the talent Delhi threw up in the late seventies - Manainder Singh and Gursharan Singh, to name just two names. Where are such promising youngsters today? Does Delhi have any to speak of?

Administrators like Mehra need to realise that they have to first put their house in order before slinging stones at the BCCI. And in any event, why should the BCCI or the selectors base their team selection on any particular association's desires? Unfortunately, people like Mehra are not much into developing talent - their priority is merely numbers, and lies in trying to push anybody at all into the national side, and thus keep the association happy that its quota has been duly filled.

It is not as if nothing can be done. For instance, the DDCA could rope in Mohinder Amarnath to take charge of cricketing matters - he is the person best fitted to rejuvenate the game in the region, to once more make Delhi the kind of force that can give Karnataka and Bombay a run for their money.

Going off on an unrelated tangent, I have been wondering just what the MRF Pace Foundation contributes to Indian cricket. And just then came a televised interview with Dennis Lillee, in course of which he asks what India had by way of pace bowlers before he came on the scene. Well, the answer is that India had a Kapil Dev - a man brought up on the staple Haryanvi diet, a man who never saw a film on sports psychology, but boy, could he bowl!

I was also unpleasantly surprised when, on television, Lillee proved unable to remember the name of "that umpire". It is time someone tells Lillee that we are all great fans of his, we appreciate him sweating it out in sultry Madras trying to help the world's budding fast bowlers - but what does get our goat is Lillee's amnesia regarding names. More so one like Srinivas Venkatraghavan - a bowler who did us proud and now, an umpire admired throughout the cricketing world.

True enough that the team is struggling at the moment. There is no bite in our attack, the morale is as low as it can be, Sachin Tendulkar is under tremendous pressure to reverse the losing trend, there is a sword of suspicion hanging over the head of each and every player following ill-judged allegations of betting and match-fixing and, to cap it all off, ill-informed "cricket correspondents" have been writing reams about the pressures of captaincy affecting Tendulkar's batting.

I suggest it is time to back off a bit. To give this young and somewhat inexperienced outfit a chance to put in their best, without burdening them with undue, and needless, pressure.