There are several reasons why sportspersons are feted in their prime and at least one for the post-retirement status diminution, in many instances, that overshadows their lives’ sunset phase.
It happens as they come to be looked upon as favour-seekers with an eye peeled for whatever is going ~ and some unusual but highyield positions contrived by dint of political influence ~ and ears closed to robustly earthy epithets.
Which was why when in Sri Lanka recently, an impressive array of former national captains ~ Arjuna Ranatunga, Sanath Jayasuriya, Kumar Sangakkara, Roshan Mahanama and Mahela Jayawardene included ~ virtually got together to thwart a plot, and found the current Twenty20 skipper, Lasith Malinga, alongside them, it would have lifted so many hearts across southern Asia.
The point at issue was a plan to build a $40 million stadium as, putatively, the centrepiece of a Sri Lankan bid for International Cricket Council tournaments. What these grandiose projects imply in the regional context is quite well-known to Indians, who have seen extravaganzas galore being hosted in this land without the country’s sporting profile rising an inch for a variety of reasons.
Infrastructure entails contracts, which bring the cronies in and that, as they, is that. In India, glib talk about “the country’s prestige” ensures a comprehensive and prolonged loot of the public exchequer.
Scandals, reported or hushedup, follow, but punishments seldom go beyond harmless chastisement or raps that don’t really hurt. The Sri Lankan stalwarts, though, were uncompromising.
And the questions they put forth made eminent sense. “Why do we need a new stadium? Don’t we have more stadiums than even Australia? What do we need a new stadium for when the existing ones aren’t hosting as many games as they could? Why must we invest in a new facility without having landed the right to host any major global tournament?”
Much more importantly, the erstwhile superstars, quite rightly, raised the point that was of the essence: what was being done by the cricket board and the government and the whole high-profile caboodle for cricket at the elementary level, where the island would find a new Muttiah Muralitharan or the Aravinda de Silva of the future?
The cricket-politics collusive alliance, up against the solidity of the arguments, was obliged to beat an eventual retreat: the project came to be dropped earlier this week.
It might seem unrealistically romantic right now to hope that the game might some day rid itself of the assorted ills that dog it just because it has won through on one occasion but optimism would be wrong to be mistaken for stupidity. A lot of things tend to go askew for commercial reasons but when stars unite, they fail to twinkle.