Why outrage over Aizawl FC U-15 team forced to travel on train floor is hypocritical
Outrage is the definitive emotion of our times. And social media has provided an outlet to express this emotion. After years of having their voices subdued, it is almost as if the human species as a collective has suddenly decided to embrace outrage in all its various forms and dump it for the world to see.
Unfortunately, like it is with extempore thought, outrage is often misinformed and not completely thought out. Sometimes it is also, in a larger sense, hypocritical.
Consider the outrage directed towards the management of the Aizawl FC football team for "forcing" their players to travel without seats after a tournament, from Kolkata to Delhi. The outrage is appropriate, no doubt. But the extent is unwarranted, and when one looks closely, it is also hypocritical.
Before we go any further, let us get one thing straight. Under no circumstances must athletes (no matter the age) be forced to undergo undue duress when participating in tournaments or competitions through their career. Under no circumstances is it okay for organisers, management and administrators to absolve themselves of such negligence by hiding behind a lack of funds or administrative misunderstanding. Having said that though, it is important to remind ourselves of the context we are dealing with here.
This is Aizawl FC, a team that won the I-League title last season, on the lowest budget in what is already the low budget league of India. They won their league on a collective team budget of Rs 2 crore. This was the driving narrative towards their victory. Everyone embraced this great, underdog, under-funded, plucky team story. No one cared to understand how this team succeeded under such a meagre budget in a time when everyone else was upscaling to garguntan levels.
In case you’re wondering: one of the ways they worked under such a small budget was by employing several players on small salaries (average salaries in the I League range from Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000). They focussed on local talent which would be cheaper to employ. These are full-time athletes, who literally, put their body on the line (who have by the way, refused the option of a back up career, by taking this up at a very young age) earning lesser than an entry level professional in corporate India.
A small team winning is a dream narrative. But a small team doing small team things causes outrage. To condemn the same team, who work on a modest budget - in a city in a state that ranks among the lowest in GDP in the country -for being unable to sponsor first-class tickets for their junior team is, to put it simply, a bit hypocritical.
If outrage should be directed, it should be directed towards the ecosystem that surrounds sport. Without a supportive ecosystem, sport cannot develop to the levels we desire it to. While it is perfectly reasonable to be outraged at U-15 players sitting on the floor of a train while travelling back home, we must also turn the blame to ourselves.
Growth in sport is not a straight line, it is a little more inclusive. The ecology surrounding sport informs the growth of the sport itself. The more the people filling stadiums, the more the pressure on the teams to improve the facilities and the quality of play. The better the facilities and quality of play, the better the player’s pay. The better the players, the better the league and the results. The better the results the more the public interest and the pressure on broadcasters. And so on and so forth.
Sport has always been about spectacle. And in modern times, spectacle is directly linked to commercial viability. Broadcasters pay to put sport on TV only if there are enough takers for it.
At a certain level all of us are equally responsible for the death of certain sports in India. Stadiums across India are half empty throughout the season and not for lack of oraganisers trying. We, the public are simply not interested in watching sport without spectacle. Not even interested enough to even watch it on TV sometimes.
We bemoan the quality of play and instead prefer to lavish our energies on teams halfway across the world. We’d rather paper our rooms with jerseys from London or Barcelona than from Aizawl and Bangalore. Because, that is a comfortable ecosystem to appropriate oneself into.
All of this translates into a struggling grassroot system. Clubs, forced into cutting corners to provide for their top teams leave themselves vulnerable for the future. And again, here, the eyeballs must turn inwards too. No one is interested in lower league sport. How many of us have ever entertained the thought of watching an age group tournament live when it plays out in our cities?
In order to improve sport, we have to - without meaning to sound soppy - wholeheartedly support it. Hiding behind the curtains of sporadic outrage isn’t enough.
Cricket watchers get outraged at the BCCI for not broadcasting the women team’s matches on their South Africa tour. Unfortunately it isn’t the BCCI’s prerogative.
Regardless, when the matches were live streamed on YouTube, they generated just over 5000 views. Not disgraceful by any standards, but hardly the figures that inspire confidence in broadcasters minds.
In late 2011, a year before women boxing made its debut at the Olympics, I remember walking down with a friend to watch MC Mary Kom train at the Karnail Singh Stadium in Paharganj. By the time I got there, Mary’s training had wrapped up, and she was packing up to leave to her hotel, a short walk past the stadium in the bylanes of Paharganj.
We walked through the narrow streets without any interuption. No one assumed that the tiny, wirey, Northeast lady wallking beside us was a five-time World Champion, and one of the pioneers of amateur boxing for women. Mary stopped at a small "kirana" shop on the way to buy shampoo (to wash out her newly coloured hair) and a bar of Rin: to wash her clothes.
A few months later, she won bronze at the Olympics. Priyanka Chopra played her in a biopic. She will probably never walk down a street unrecognised in India again. Priyanka Chopra that is. Mary still can. Young boxers who watched her win bronze and followed in her footsteps in Manipur (and elsewhere) still go train hard in the day, walk several miles home, and wash their clothes before going to sleep.
No one cares for junior sportsmen, because no one cares for sport. Everyone lauds the U-19 cricket team once they win the World Cup. But the stands at Ranji Trophy games, where this same bunch willl forge their skills over the next few years will stay empty.
Outrage is good. But outrage isn’t enough.
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