Outsourcing and Sports

Outsourcing of business processes is something that Indians are doing a lot these days. It is an industry employing millions of youths in India. This has created a lot of furor in the west, as people are losing jobs. People are getting tagged as "bangalored". Since I am not the person who has lost a job to someone else, I can not understand their pain.

Indians have also been outsourcing some important jobs to developed countries. Since the title mentions sports, let’s talk about outsourcing in sports. I am particularly interested in three sports - football, hockey and cricket.

Football in my opinion is not made for us. After watching the European leagues, I am positive that Indians simply can not play football, because we don't have the physique for it. May be some people from the armed forces can take it up, but others simply do not have the physique and athleticism for it. We employ foreign coaches who merely manage to improve our rating from 156 to 155.

Hockey - our national sport - and we hardly put any money in it. We have a hire and fire policy as far as coaches is concerned, and the funny part is we keep rotating the same coaches. I only hear the following names - Cedric D'souza, V Bhaskaran, and some others. How many times Cedric D'souza or V Bhaskaran have been our hockey coach - even they might have forgotten by now. A German coach, Gerard Rach, was employed and fired in the midst of a tournament. In spite of so many changes in coaches, we still play hockey with a straight stick, we still can't convert penalty corners, we still concede penalty corners by dozens, and we still dribble the ball needlessly thereby losing possession of the ball.

The real outsourcing happens in cricket. BCCI is crazy about foreign coaches - John Wright, and then Greg Chappell; foreign trainers - Gregory Allen King, Andrew Leipus, John Gloster. In spite of so much foreign investment for last 6 years, our players are still not fit. They are still not athletic. Our players still can't bat with a straight bat, still can't bowl at the death, and the same problems plague Indian cricket. With India's abysmal show (I can't use the word performance here) in the World Cup, there is bound to be some root-cause-analysis; and if there is none, my sincere advice to the BCCI would be to stop functioning altogether.

Sometimes I think we need to outsource the job of "playing" to the Australians - they excel in all three fields.