Saturday, January 6, 2007

Sport In India

The point of this blog is to unite all the sports loving Indians far and wide. I believe that as a community we are one of the most fanatical and sportsloving people... the problem is that we have too few people to cheer for. That needs to change!!! Not next year, next month, tomorrow.... NOW!!!!
Collectively we fans just have to wake up every morning and ask ourselves "What are we going to do for Indian sport today?"
There are a million different problems facing sport today and we have saturated ourselves talking about them, however what we haven't talked about is "What is the solution?" The talent is there, the facilities are somewhat there, the money is slowly creeping in, however the plan and desire to build a champion is missing.
This is in our hands to change. Everybody has some contribution to make. It doesn't mean we have to donate our life savings, even the smallest things make a big difference. Maybe like helping out an athlete during practice, giving them an opportunity to watch a world class event, or maybe even an encouraging word can go a long way. It is these small things that will eventually lead to big change. So my friends the time is now, lets not waste another moment and take matters into our own hands. As the famous quote goes " if we shoot for the stars, maybe we will hit the moon"

3 comments:

Cleaning said...

Welcome to the blog world, Manisha. Nice to see you articulate your thoughts on a platform like this. Am sure you will find that with the passage of time, more and more people will not only read your blog but also make a difference to the way they perceive sport. You must also add a bit more about your own tennis background in your profile. So the visitors to your blog will know that your thoughts stem from your own experience as a player and as an administrator.
Warm regards
Raj

Unknown said...

The best bit about the cricket monkeys losing is that the song and dance of cricket journalists will also be contained.
Envision this:
Newspaper proprietors one day wake up to find that they have actually been conned for long by their sports editors who need cricket as all other sport requires attentive reporters. Cricket is the only laze that meanders along for hours and hours allowing all decent self-respecting journalists to get drunk out of their minds before they even consider writing. Then, for all you know there is no result worth the write -- especially in not so Testing situations -- so everybody is happy peddling gyan in the name of reporting. The ones who cover cricket seriously need not be taken seriously. They haven’t figured the basics – a ten-nation sport is a joke; it does not merit serious attention. Anyway, so the proprietors banish cricket reporting to its rightful place -- the briefs column alongwith the other chaddi-baniyan items like the number of chaddis that Tendulkar took to the WC to counter his perennial wedgy situation and the kind of baniyans Yuvraj likes to wear to hide his flabby middle and shabby muscle tone.
Suddenly there was a crisis in Indian sports journalism as very few reporters actually knew that other sport existed. Like animals let out of a zoo they were lost in the real world.
This scenario will be further developed by Kamesh who should have long ago replaced sad acts like Shekhar Suman with his own classy one.

Unknown said...

First of all, cricket is not viewed as a sport in India. So, Manisha may perhaps call it the darkest day in Indian cricket, in World Cup, to be precise.

There are many who are ready to whip cricket now. Let us leave the task to better hands !

I would only like to say that Ronjan Sodhi shot too good in the ongoing World Cup in Santo Domingo, not just because he won the bronze. The talented Punjab lad emerging out of the shadow of Olympic silver medallist Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, shot a world class score of 187 out of 200. It was just too good. To shoot near flawless rounds of 49 and 48 after having stumbled off to a relatively bad start with a 43 out of 50 shows that the lad has the courage to fight it out. He shot a 47 out of 50 in the final, and that augurs well for his Olympic qualification campaign.

It may not be the right thing to compare, but there is no harm pointing out that the Olympic gold at Athens in 2004 went at 189. Rathore himself had shot a 179 to bag the silver. Of course, Rathore has shot many better scores and won World Cup gold apart from world championship medal etc.

In the World Cup at Santo Domingo, there were 51 shooters competing in double trap from 21 countries. Some of the former world and Olympic champions did not even make the final.

Coming back to cricket, I think, most of us like the game. Some of us are disappointed and disturbed by the mania and the wicked marketing. We have many world class sportspersons, but we as a nation are glued to films and cricket. Too much of anything is good for nothing.