Club Cricket in Bangalore: Lessons Learnt over a Working Lunch

Jupiter Cricket Club

My colleague GT is making a comeback from a nasty ankle injury suffered over a year ago and is back practicing with his club whom he intends to represent again this season. GT the cricketer plays for a club called Jupiter, which fields teams in multiple divisions of the Bangalore club cricket league organized by the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA).

Jupiter has been around for twenty or more years and raises funds by charging its members (the players) a sum of rupees two hundred a month. Assuming a membership of around fifty people that would generate annual revenues of a lakh and twenty thousand rupees. In addition to this, they may receive a cash award from KSCA, if they finish high enough in the divisions that their teams are represented.

The money that the club raises is spent on equipment, logistics and participation fees. Like many other local clubs, Jupiter has minimized the cost for the ground by renting space owned by the local corporation and hence is able to manage sufficiently well within the funds raised. Since a number of players like GT, represent Jupiter more with the objective of staying active in the game rather than graduating to the higher echelons of district/state/national cricket, the objective is well served. Of course, none of the players get paid for their efforts and I suspect all of them would hold some sort of a day job or another.

The Cricketer Career Path

Clubs like Jupiter form one part of the rather intense and broad based local cricket scene. KSCA also organizes school and university level tournaments and has yet another competitive set up for Companies, with many public sector enterprises keeping players on pay rolls to represent them in these tournaments.

There is a degree of inter-play within each of these leagues, with clubs being free to pick players either from the school and university pool or from the pool that represents Companies. For both sets of players, playing for the clubs would probably provide them more exposure as well as competitiveness, though in very rare cases would that be translating into direct financial rewards.

So that establishes a structure where provided you have enough talent and are not horribly unlucky, you could get ample opportunities to get noticed for the bigger stage, while being able to make a living doing what you love best (if that happens to be playing cricket).

Imagine the scenario, a promising school kid gets noticed by a club and is picked up by them to start playing in a division where most of the players are better and more experienced. The youngster’s game improves and when he passes out of school, he lands a job with a prestigious enough public sector company and plays cricket for them. Thus, the young man’s livelihood is ensured while he uses the club league performances to get noticed by state and zonal selectors and then attempts to chart his way into the Ranji, Duleep, IPL or even the Indian team.

I know it does not always work out so simply for all talented cricketers and there are enough holes in the system which sees many players having to drop out of the competitive scene even before they hit their prime. Point is that the basic structure to make the scenario possible exists and maybe that is why this city (and the country) has abundance in numbers and talent with regards to cricket.

Lessons for Others

To explain my point in another way, here’s a question – What percentage of kids representing their school in football, continue to play competitive football at any level at the age of twenty-five? What is the same statistic for cricket?

I don’t have the answers, but my gut feeling is that cricket will outscore football by a fair margin. Therein lies the challenge for football, hockey and any other sport you care to think of. Get enough kids to play the game in school, keep enough of them playing when they are adults and you will get enough raw matter to turn into champions. All other talk of better infrastructure, better coaching, and increased sponsorship is secondary. For me, the problem of Indian sport is the problem of keeping the kid on the field when the kid grows old and that is where cricket has succeeded.

A Reason to Play

I was in Jamshedpur on vacation last week and driving around town with the family in tow, we saw an archery event taking place in the JRD Tata Sports Complex. Intrigued and excited, Arti (my wife) and I returned to the scene of action a few hours later and it was a thrilling sight.

More than a hundred kids with bows ranging from the wooden to the coolest taking aim at targets placed 30-120 meters (or was it yards ??) away. This was the national junior archery championship and teams from all across the country were there to do battle. We had encountered the archers before the actual competition had started and what we saw were some practice rounds.

What a sight!

And then I wondered how many of them would still be shooting arrows in five-ten years time! Arti herself had played basketball for her state and then it never occurred to her to continue to do so after school was done. How many of these kids I saw would be in the pool of players still aiming for the Olympics when they reach the age?
The answer sadly is not many. Like Arti, for many travelling for camps and national level meets as a school kid will become memories in adulthood with not enough real relevance. One cannot blame them as a living will have to be made and the bread earned and the mortgage paid. The answer has to be in the direct linkage of livelihood with sports.

Take the example of Biwani and the boxers that are made. If you box well you can get a job with the army. This has created a large pool of boxers and the facilities to train them. And form this large pool have emerged one Olympic medalist and two who got close.

If similar solutions can be traced for more and more disciplines and similar pool of sportspersons can get created for each of them, I’m sure in a country as large as ours we will still be producing champions in spite of a lack of infrastructure and the best coaching. The trick is to make sure that they do not stop playing.
And the answer for football will also lie there. Yes, footballers probably have more of a future economically than archers even today, but then it is a sport that the whole world plays and hence the critical mass requirements for football are that much larger.

So here’s in search of a solution that gives youngsters an economic reason to play football. If anyone reads this and has an idea, let’s discuss and implement it. If it’s not for football but for any other sport (say shooting or swimming or wrestling or anything else) let’s hear about it and do something about it. There are many things that Indian sports is need of, but the biggest of them all is – a reason to play.