In a country like India, where money for sport is hardly plentiful except when the Centre takes it into its head to organise an international, multidiscipline extravaganza, well might the worst mark that the coronavirus pandemic could leave have to do with grassroots efforts.
They could be hit hard in a short time. Going by people slaving away on that very, very low rung, nurturing young ones with honest as well as high ambitions, the immediate indicators of hard times ahead are unmistakable.
True, a deep wallet is not all there is to catching ‘em young and coaching ‘em to stardom but being down at heel is an additional handicap: going toe to toe with rivals from economically advanced countries calls for matching, if not superior, infrastructure.
Will a properly structured and planned nursery have the wherewithal to dream big in a virusravaged setting? Who will fund the project? Aren’t we headed for a recession? Aren’t jobs set to be lost? People who take pay cuts and those who patronise sport institutions on the obscure fringes of society are entirely different specimens of humanity, right?
There will surely be a day when the lockdown will be part of our past and life will regain its purpose and rhythm but organisers of many low-profile clubs, camps, so-called academies, urban or rural, say that they fail to visualise being able, for a long time to come, to amass even the limited resources that were previously available.
The blues are not induced by being cooped up at home doing nothing. The point is that many of the self-appointed players of the friend-philosopher-guide role in metropolitan or rural sport say that the shock treatment that the pandemic has subjected every aspect of life to reduces games, and allied activities, to piffle.
Picking up in post-lockdown life where they left off before it, they say, will be extremely difficult because people all of a sudden have realised that there can be prolonged periods when even brash and loud sport, which glues television together, 24×7, can be put in its place.
There can be times when people don’t get to crowd into stadiums and practitioners of sporting crafts are not even allowed so much as a tune-up session in a park, as Tottenham Hotspur realised so recently in England. The headline-grabbers aren’t the superheroes beyond all the world’s restrictive regulations they are represented as.
They are ordinary mortals like us. Is sport, then, in an existential crisis? Not really, since it will be part of the pleasures of the city, when it gets up on its feet again. But there mightn’t be either help or appreciation beyond its limits, where human existence is predicted to get harder. That could presage the loss of a lot of talent, given the fact that India lives in the main in its far-off villages.