Cricket unites all Indians

Cricket unites all Indians and it is the biggest sports cum entertainment industry.So, let us stick to facts and firm it up for the future of at least these industries.

                                  Well done Team India.

                     1.Let us Indians move away from our proverbial psychological weakness of  unloving criticism, uncritical love, over kill of irrelevant analyzes and excessive expectations, too many Television discussions by arm chair critics etc

                          2. Cricket has always been the great ‘game of glorious uncertainties’.

                              First we must place all facts on the board before analyzing rather than resorting to arm chair criticism.

3.   Cricket unites all Indian more than anything else on earth including the concern for their own life. So, everyone gets involved with varying degrees of attention, time devoted and importance in some way or other.

4.   It is the biggest  sports cum entertainment industry of the nation with a few lakh individual participating actively , benefiting and making their livelihood and a few  million others indirectly benefiting from/through it.

5.   So, the interest, involvement and the revenue it generates on the whole is enormous for any sane person to ignore it even if he is not interested in the game in India.

6.    Naturally, therefore, it has produced many great stars of the game and icons for the masses.

7.   No player who reaches the stage of representing the country after undergoing stiff competition at all levels including overcoming all politics, family situation-based constraints, enduring many physical and psychological hurdles and sacrificing many other things in life would like to throw away a great opportunity to become a greater hero in important matches.

8.   Like all other industries this is also global and we need to survive in the global market.

9.   This is a tricky industry which cannot be run like a corporate house because the uncertainty factors are too many, surprisingly including the ground size and it is perhaps one of its many surprise elements which make it more interesting.

10.         We all need to live with certain universal facts like fortune is fluctuating; fluke is fickle in any walk of life; form is temporary; failures are inevitable etc

11.         But having said all that we also need to patiently devote lot of time to analyze the probable causes/reasons for failure purely from cricketing technical aspects and try to rectify them to ensure consistency of enhanced and excellent performance of Indian cricket team which is the main source/ product for the two industries of sports and entertainment and livelihood for all those engaged in them along with a hoard of accessory industries connected with these two.

12.         The technical flaws and short comings in my view are very minimal and can be easily overcome by the Indian cricketers who are a bunch of highly talented, eager and quick learners.

13.         I am not an expert but from what I have observed the following can be done as it is with the existing players.

14.         While all our IPL franchisees spend in crores to scout and recruit foreign players to entertain the cricket loving and feed the cricket hungry public with grand gala shows of talents from other nations, we also need to develop pitches which have similar fast and bouncy tracks like the Australian and South African tracks along with our existing tracks which helps spinners and batsmen.

15.         We also need built many more stadiums in extreme North Eastern cold regions as well as Himachal Pradesh to get used to cold and swinging conditions.

16.         Very often it is the extra pace, bounce and swing which lets down our talented batsmen.

17.         We need to scout for good athletic experts to coach talented youth to withstand physical rigors and psychologists to train them to with stand psychological pressure etc.

18.         Our villages have lot of able bodied, hard working athletic youth, who may not speak in English, but who can play good cricket if trained properly. I request BCCI and the IPL franchisees to spend some thought and money on all these.

19.         When Pakistan can produce so many excellent fast bowlers why not India because we mostly confine even cricket to elite schools and metros.

20.         Despite that raw talent and genius prop up on the national scene but unless they are methodically groomed with certain bench marks and well set goals then in the long run all the raw talent will go unutilized or underutilized as it happens to many potential great players in Pakistan, Caribbean Islands etc. The West Indian teams of 70s faded along with retirement of its extraordinarily talented players due to lack methodical grooming, the Pakistan of early 90s vanished the same way, the Australian team of late 90s to 2000 went the same way, though they have bounced back every now and then, the Indian teams of last decade need not go the same way as Indians can and must bounce back like the Aussies.

21.         We need to hatch ability out of potentiality and make it deliver optimum utility through methodical training, encouragement and care.

22.         Wahab Riaz’s spell against Australia was the best exhibition of pace bowling in the whole tournament till now but unfortunately the cricketing world hardly bothers about such talent because his own country for all you may know may drop him next season due to some internal politics.

23.         Indian cricket has achieved greatness even to this extent with exceptional talents of  vintage spinners like Prasanna, Bedi, Chandrasekar,Padmakar Shivalkar, V.V. kumar, Bapu Natkarni, S. Venkatraghavan, great batting legends like Sunil Gavaskar, sheer raw talents like G.R. Vishwanath, M.L. Jaishima, Salim Durani, Kapil Dev etc and recently Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Shewag, Rahul Dravvid, V.V.S. Lakshman, Saurav Ganguly etc have thrived despite lack of support from the industry in proportion to their contribution to the industry.

24.         I would like to underline support in proportion to the contribution to the industry, proportionate to the impact they have had on Indian cricketing industry, proportionate to the happy occasion they have offered to millions of fans whereas we pay crores to heroes of every language film in India who appear in stereotyped dance sequences, stories and fight scenes.

25.         Please try to understand a Steve Jobs importance and revenue cannot be the same like the best software brain who heads as CEO of a software company.

26.         Impact is more important.

27.         We tend to forget the long term interests of the industry with every major event and therefore fail to pay attention to the vital micro details/aspects.