Is cricket making us lazy?!!

I am sure there would be lots of brickbats but when you are being critical of a religion you should be ready for all of those and much more.

I have nothing against cricket except the fact that I suck at it.:) This is no doubt a wonderful game. No other game that I know requires as diverse a set of skills as cricket does. It requires good strength and stamina. On top of that, it requires tremendous eye, hand and feet combination. Patience and balance are the bywords cricket gurus swear by. And of course, without mental toughness there is no sport. But lets accept the obvious - cricketers (well, most cricketers) are nowhere as physically fit as their international counterparts in games like football, hockey, tennis, etc. Let us just consider outdoor physical games. I mean there is no other game where a person as unfit as Ganguly could have attained the status that he has in the game of cricket.

But the thrust of this article is not the fitness of professional cricketers. I want to make a comment on the millions of children,young adults and adults who pursue this game in their spare time as an outdoor sport. These are people who spend two to three hours of their evenings playing cricket. Personally I believe, far from keeping them fit, it is actually making them unfit/lazy. Two or three hours of cricket hardly entails any physical activity to speak of. Apart from probably the bowler and to some extent the batsman, the remaining fielders do nothing more than watch the game!! No wonder we have the biggest audience but just one world cup. Even something as dumb as walking would exercise more muscles and burn more calories than getting involved in this game for just 2 or 3 hours.

If instead, our country spends those two hours playing contact sports like football or hockey or for that matter sports like table tennis or badminton, we will be blessed with a much fitter population. Not only are these sports much more physically taxing, these games involve a lot more people and have minimal to no pre requisites. Also the average number of people involved is high. Not to speak of the boost our world rankings would receive in these sports with more and more people taking to them.

Not to forget the hours one spends glued to the telivision sets watching these matches and even in office I am sure cricinfo has the maximum number of hits. Some respite to the hapless cricinfo boys with youtube eager to share the burden of internet demand for this game. The shortest version of this game is as long as 3 hours which beats every other sport hands down.

But I do understand that mere writing blogs about this problem is not going to help. People cannot be forced into taking up one sport or another. A sport like cricket is famous because it is very efficiently managed. Someone taking up this sport professionally is assured of a decent income and life. Most other games in India have failed to generate that level of confidence in them and this can only be corrected by the organisations that run these sports.

Another necessity for people to adopt a certain sport is the presence of superstars in that game. Cricket has been fortunate enough to have loadful of superstars whom children would want to emulate. These Sachins and Dhonis and Gavaskars are lacking in other sports. We have the odd Bhutia or Sania or Saina or Dhanraj but no game can boast of as steady a stream of world class performers that cricket can. Unfortunately for such a steady stream one needs to have a great skeletal structure which can take years to build and bear fruits. Thus this becomes a vicious circle and hence the superstars in other sports are inspite of the system instead of being because of the system. This circle needs to be broken and the only logical point seems to be the governing bodies of these sports.


It may be argued that we may not produce as many world class cricketers as we do if an enormously large amount of people did not follow and play this game. But look at a country like South Africa - world class cricketers, world class footballers, world class hockey players and world class rugby players and not even half as many people as ours.

Ironically IPL is the best thing that has happened to Indian cricket(i m sure even this is highly debatable, but definitely the best thing to the pockets of BCCI) and the worst thing to Indian sport.

So friends my advice is : eat and drink cricket as much as you have to but play everything but cricket. :)