Huddle Muddle

The Olympians had a lone medallist among them. The cricketers went from highs to sighs. And the sports managers continued with their indifference. Team India looked lost but some performers shone: Rathore, Kumble, Tendulkar and Harikrishna.

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together, baby
Sometimes you're going to lose it all.
The Bug, Dire Straits

THE BLUES BROTHERS: Team India looks for answers

Occasionally, there is solace to be found in rock music. Not solution or direction, but just a few words of shoulder-shrugging comfort. After 12 months of drama and chaos, talk-up and let-down in no other place but the muddied world of Indian sport, does this truth hold true: bugs and windshields are but two incarnations of the very same thing? What bard could better describe what happened to the Men in Blue in the space of a few months? To its hotshot hockey team, or indeed to the entire travelling jatra of India's Olympic campaign?

UP

INDIA NO. 1 Anil Kumble is 2004's No. 1 Test wicket taker. CHESS CHURN Harikrishna, Harika keep the flag flying. TOP SHOT Sania Mirza breaks into the world's top 200. IRFAN PATHAN Stays sharp and smart through a tough year. AIM AND FIRE Three shooters reach the Olympics finals.

DOWN

NO MINISTER Post Athens, ministry fails to use new broom. IOA MANDARINS New offices, fresh elections, same old attitude. CAPTAIN CHAOS Sourav Ganguly runs into referees and strife. PITCH DOCTORS The wicket wizards got it all wrong this season. CRICKET STOCK One-day defeats sound alarm bells for 2007 World Cup plans.

The Olympics is a good place to start because it is there that all the bombast about Indian sport ends. Grandiose promises and sweeping statements of world conquest are deflated as the Indian athlete, usually under-funded and under-prepared, lines up against Goliaths on a level playing field where slingshots do not quite work. In Athens, even though the predictions went awry, there was one little twist. Three shooters made it to the finals, but Anjali Bhagwat was not one of them. India's lone medal came from the booming shotgun of Major Rajyavardhan Rathore, who had made the least sound in the run-up to Athens.

With an entire nation holding its breath, long jumper Anju Bobby George uncorked the best jump of her life in Athens. When the women's 4x400 m team broke a national mark on the way to a surprise spot in the finals, who did not wonder what they could have done with George's level of preparation. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi went past doubles teams featuring world No. 1 Roger Federer and No. 2 Andy Roddick on their way to the medal round, but in the bronze medal play-off-that continued for close to four hours, well past the time the clock struck midnight-were beaten by two Croatians who had paired up only this year for the Olympics. As "The Bug" goes on, Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger/sometimes you're the ball.

Sourav Ganguly chose to be less poetic. "Cricket is heartless," he fumed and you could not blame the fellow for letting off steam. When 2004 kicked in, India had not just survived in Australia but sent baggy greens scurrying. They won friends and, voila, matches too in Pakistan, coming home with the one-day series 3-2 and the Test series 2-1. It was the team's best result outside India since 1986 and Ganguly had become India's most successful cricket captain. Australia, it was triumphantly thought, here we come.

Er ... more like, here we come apart.

34 champagne bottles sent by Gavaskar to Tendulkar when he equalled his record.

With the onset of the new season came confusion. Dud results in four back to back one-day tournaments were followed by a series defeat against Australia which had everything (curators gone loco, captains gone hors de combat and four innings gone in two days) except synchronised batting effort from the Indian top five. The same whom the Wisden Cricket Almanac had just compared to the Galacticos of Real Madrid. Takes very little, it seems, to go from huddle to muddle.

{ TOP 10 BLOTS }

1. DRUG BUSTS Two women weightlifters caught for doping at the Olympics. 2. WASTED LIFE Injured rower Sobini Rajan commits suicide when medical debt piles up. 3. ON-FIELD NEGLECT Brazilian footballer Cristiano Junior dies during a match. 4. BOARD TO TEARS The BCCI's annual election degenerates into a legal free-for-all 5. TELLY-TALE SIGNS TV rights for Indian cricket go to the highest bidder-for a rebid. 6. OWN GOAL A month before the Olympics, the hockey team has a new coach. 7. OUT IN THE OPEN During the Games, two hockey players trash the new coach on TV. 8. MISSING IN ACTION Olympic chef de mission P.R. Dasmunshi does two days of duty. 9. WAYWARD AIM Suma Shirur's 8th place in Athens is reported as finishing "last". 10. NO SHOW Bahadur Singh, K. Malleswari fail to do even the minimum in Athens.

The opening partnership that had anchored the Test batting is broken, the Rahul Dravid one-day wicket-keeper formula works no more and flaws are being detected in Captain Fantastic. The physio is going at the end of the year, the coach will most likely be gone in four months and all the questions that the Indians thought they had answered are back again. "Our success had masked many problems," said one player. All masks and gloves are now surely off. Teams talk of momentum and that is what the cricketers have lost in a three-month break after Pakistan. They must huff and puff to win it back before the Pakistanis come around in 2005.

Indian hockey has been leaking momentum for six years, ever since the team won the 1998 Asian Games gold medal and witnessed the sacking of six senior players. Every year brings more of the same, and after the team won four tournaments in 2003, what could follow but the inevitable crash in the Olympic year?

A month before Athens the coach who had taken the team to title victories in 2003 is sacked and replaced by an unknown German, Gerhard Rach. The team finishes seventh at the Games, loses a home series to Pakistan, finishes fourth at the Champions Trophy and before the year is out, Rach does not know whether he will continue in 2005.

The IHF's new year resolution is to unleash a snazzily made-over hockey league on the public with a promise to "sex up" the image of the country's much-battered national sport. The Premier Hockey League promises marketing, merchandising, new formats, new teams-but with the same old administrators in charge.

"Peene wala doshi hai, pilane wala nahin (the one who drinks is guilty, not the one who serves)." SUNIL DUTT, SPORTS MINISTER, on whether coaches are to blame for doping

These wild swings of fortune could reduce a monk to dizziness. But between the process and the result, the windshield and the bug, lies the twilight zone of cause and effect. All it takes to go from cruise control to brake failure is a few seconds. In sport there are hours, sessions and seasons in which everything that can go wrong, does. If a coach is appointed a month before the biggest sporting event in the world, as happened with hockey, even the most habitual of gold medallists can lose their magic. If a discipline like weightlifting, ridden with corruption and cut-price coaching, is left unchecked, positive dope tests like those of Pratima Kumari and Sanamacha Chanu are accidents waiting to happen. If a cricket board headed by Jagmohan Dalmiya, the most powerful man in the sport, cannot organise its TV rights in time, it will naturally enough forget to book a hotel for its team before its biggest home series in four seasons. If it cannot organise an annual election without causing a legal free-for-all, how will it ensure that everyone pulls in one direction? If all of that can happen, is it any surprise that a 35-year-old record can fall without a fuss?

THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHES: Indian hockey attempts an image makeover

If there is one discipline which has a handle on a steady momentum, it must be chess. Not a year has gone by in recent memory when Indians have not been genuine achievers, whether Grand Masters and women GM title winners, youth world champions or medallists. To no one's surprise, an Indian is the world junior champion today. P. Harikrishna is only the second Indian after Viswanathan Anand to win the world juniors. When another world champion from these shores is found-and make no mistake, he or she will be-then the accidental revolution sparked off by Anand will be complete.

But what of the epidemic set off by Extraa Innings? The Mandira Bedi-inspired mayhem has led to a meltdown among the starched collars of Mandi House and the "few good men" of ESPN Star. DD's routinely below-par telecasts are bookended by the Fourth Umpire Show featuring actor Roshni Chopra in a supporting role to Charu Sharma, Atul Wassan and K. Srikkanth. Given her recent demolition of Navjot Sidhu on a TV show, maybe Chopra should be heard as much as she is seen. ESPN Star, not content with its sleazy Shas & Waz item number, first unleashed a mini-skirted nurse as part of its Pitch Doctor package but has now shelved the skirt for a more subtle approach: the girl-next-door charm of Perizaad Zorabian as part of Harsha Ki Khoj.

BATTLE OF THE BABES

NO GLAM, NO PROGRAMME: The Mandira phenomenon launches the new cricket TV face-off between DD's Chopra (left) and ESPN Star's Zorabian (centre)

In 2005, keep the eyes peeled for more than just eyecandy: this is the year Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar, world record holders both, will seek to put some distance between themselves and the nearest competition. The year Indian hockey will know whether the market and marketing will save it. The year when Sania Mirza will try to make the great leap forward and upward from No. 170 in the world rankings and look to find her place among the big girls. When another prodigy hunched over a chess board will make the moves that announce his or her arrival. When the cricket team will decide to rise up or fall behind.

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