Sports trends: New generation, old school

Four athletes who have defied latest trends, and charted their own course

In this day and age, where sporting philosophy has dramatically changed to keep up with the latest demands and  game-play has been influenced by newest formats, some youngsters have harked back to an older style of play. We look at four athletes who have defied latest trends, and charted their own course

Beat of a different drummer

Arman Jaffer
Age: 17
Cricket: India Under-19

“It’s the sound that gives a great sense of joy and satisfaction.” He whispers it almost, but the emotionally-loaded voice conveys what he is feeling. “Jab ball bat mey middle hota hai na, it’s a very good feeling. And when it goes into the gaps, it feels really nice. When the ball connects well with the bat, that sound gives me the biggest mazaa.”

Arman Jaffer is 17 and is talking about the greatest aural pleasure of his life. The teenager is at an intriguing phase in life. He has just hit a record hat-trick of double hundreds in Cooch Behar Trophy to force his way into the U-19 World Cup team and he still holds the record for the highest score in Indian school cricket — a knock of 498 in 2010.

This isn’t about the next batting talent from Mumbai, for only time will tell that, but it allows us a fascinating peek into the mind space of a young cricketer who stands out from his peers with his approach that is a throwback to earlier times.

Cricketer in the IPL age should be a thesis paper somewhere. Even former cricketers like Rahul Dravid have fretted about it and no one is really sure how much effect the most popular format in the country has on budding cricketers. We saw that in a Sarfraz Khan, the young boy who caught the eye in IPL with his cheekily insolent batting style and we laughed when he talked about how his team-mate AB de Villiers wears two abdomen guards for protection for those insane lap-shots and he made us smile with his observation that “Kohli toh kuch khaata hi nahi!”.

Then there is Arman. Cricket has been the long running theme of his life that is intricately tied up with that of his father’s, so much so that it’s difficult to separate the two threads. The cricket obsessed father-cum-coach Kalim, who once coached his younger brother Wasim to great heights before the pair fell out, is a constant presence in Arman’s life. Arman has just been selected for the U-19 team, and his younger sister Fathima, a fast bowler who also excels as a left-arm spinner, is in Mumbai’s U-19 team. Shy, un-expressive unlike the other animated family members, he is ironically perhaps more like his uncle Wasim with whom he hasn’t had much interaction, though, due to that family feud.

Arman is a batsman who accumulates runs quietly without drawing too much attention to his style of play. Unlike many of his peers, he is more cricketing aware and he is also someone who believes his calm temperament will steer him out of tougher cricketing challenges. “I don’t show much emotion. I don’t let success or failure to get to my head.” There has been a flood of success in the recent times. He has just broken into the Under-19 World Cup team by piling up the runs. He wasn’t selected for couple of U-19 tri-series but slammed three consecutive double hundreds which were prefixed by a knock of 174. Two of the double hundreds had come before the selection to the tri-series but he forced his way to the U-19 World Cup team by amassing more runs.

His father is a constant source of cricketing philosophy and Arman too talks about batting like an adult. One evening it’s about how there is no risk if the intent is to keep the ball down along the ground. Next week, he talks about he has developed an all-round game that helps him go forward or back.

He talks about how he asks his bat makers for two different types — one thinner on the shoulder and with a thin bottom below the fat sweet spot. The other one is thick-set around the edges and even at the bottom. For 20 minutes, he dives into how he uses the bats according to the match situation and how it’s tailored according to seamers and spinners.

It’s clear that Arman is a batsman produced by the Indian cricket system. The various age group tournaments and the vast experience, and organic growth, inherent in such a system-driven growth are a comforting factor. He pulls up a match from U-16 days, a sticky pitch where he decided he won’t drive at all. “Otherwise ball uth (lift) jaata tha. I would either hit it over or just block. I didn’t drive that day to the spinners. It gave me great satisfaction.” He then jumps to a game in U-19 where the ball swung and seamed and his team was 20 for 4 or thereabouts. “I just batted and batted, a lot of dot balls, left many a delivery outside off stump and wore down the bowlers. I learnt the art of patience.”

“I am technically compact,” he says before deciding to make a correction. “Well, I guess it’s up to others to see if I am technically good but let me say that I am a compact player.” He hopes to do well in U-19 and get into the Mumbai Ranji squad, even if not the playing 11, this season itself.

And one day, “senior India k liye khelna hai”. He doesn’t want to put a year to that goal but when you leave his small 10 by 10 single-roomed house where his mother pats the head of her teenage daughter after finishing her afternoon namaaz, one can sense desires, ambitions, and passion floating in the house. It’s a powerful cocktail of hope and dreams, and it will be utterly fascinating to watch the fortunes of this family in the coming years.

On court, lazy elegance meets natural flair 

Rituparna Das
Age: 19
Badminton: Women’s singles

There’ll always be the temptation; to point her Saina-wards or Sindhu-wards. To frame the image of the two iconic players, while they pump their fists and unleash their power growls, into neat laminated posters and hang them on her wall. To drone into Rituparna Das that she ought to aspire to be the next-Saina or a future Sindhu.

And though it is an almighty effort to de-hyphenate the lazy from the elegance and often pushes coach Pullela Gopichand to tethering temper and general teeth grinding annoyance, Rituparna Das with her transcendental talent continues to float on the badminton court, holding onto the promise that the coach first saw in her six years ago. The name Syed Modi gets mentioned when they talk about the talent that this 19-year-old from Haldia, West Bengal possesses. There’s also the evanescent memory of Ami Ghia’s playing days, the effortlessness of strokeplay and the flowing movements, a whiff of timelessness to shuttle’s proceedings. And finally, there’s the sighing shrug as Gopichand brings out the instance of Sachin Ratti, his own contemporary who dripped similar talent and could’ve achieved so much more, but just didn’t.

The onus is also firmly on the girl herself to show some urgency and push herself to get into international reckoning from where her breathtaking game can begin to count where it matters. So, what makes Ritupana click but ticks off her coach?

She’s a natural, who can see corners on the rival’s rectangle and is blessed with an acute court-sense where she reads opponents better than most and can anticipate where a shuttle will fall halfway through an opponent’s stroke. There are also her own astonishing crosscourt drops, and deception at the net, some lovely dribbles that can make badminton watching such a pleasure, even without the usual recourse to shrill jingoistic support that gets extended to Indian shuttlers as the country chases medals. Rituparna will not leave you waving a giant flag in a noisy stadium, she’ll pin you to your bucket seat and make you throw your head back in rollicking wonderment at her court-craft. It’s like going to an opera house in an age when everyone else is flocking the headbanger’s ball.

The natural flair though is crucially constricted by her limitations: she is too relaxed, too slow to handle the furious pace of international rallies and too laidback to work obsessively on her fitness that can help her last the duration of a match. Speed and stamina and strength are all deficient. A pity, since she buys herself precious seconds through her innate anticipation, moving intuitively on the court chasing the shuttle. But with that cocktail of weaknesses in her armour, Das will be a sitting duck if flung onto the international stage.

“She’s capable of much bigger results, but needs to summon a level of urgency and work very, very hard on fitness and take initiative,” Gopichand says.

While the shuttler sees herself as a rally specialist who can control the shuttle (“I don’t know how I learnt it, it just happened as I played”), the coach keeps drilling into her psyche that she needs power in her hands.

There’s the whole power aspect — and the contrast is so stark when pitted against a strong Saina Nehwal or the hyper-aggressive PV Sindhu, that you almost expect Rituparna’s game to wither away if it isn’t entirely blasted off the court. “I know I need power in my smash and aggression,” she says, though adding clearly, “I don’t really want to play like anyone else. I like my own style of play.” India’s top two can grit out long challenges, have built the power to match the very best in the world and are mentally in a higher sphere of being almost unbreakable. Das’s porcelain pretty game obviously looks vulnerable on a big court and if the shuttles are not whizzing away.

She started in her early teens at the Haldia Refinery Club, and played TT for the first six months. She would move to Hyderabad at 15 when the national coach spotted her, but run home ever so often — Durga Puja, Happy Birthday, summer and winter vacations and the more tearful ‘missing-home’ moments. Her mum would soon shift to Hyderabad, the father an IOC employee staying back in Bengal. Though the discipline and drive seem suspect, there is a silent pledge in the girl to not let her talent fritter away. “I know I need to improve a lot. But I do want to get there — Olympics and World No 1,” she says.

She reached a Senior nationals final beating far more experienced opponents with a torn hamstring strapping a crepe bandage two years ago.

She clearly had the strokes to confound a rampaging Sindhu back then, but didn’t look like she could last the distance — and didn’t, losing the title. The take-off hasn’t happened though coaches say she’s a sponge who picks strokes merely looking at someone play. Early coach Somnath Kar recalls showing her Lin Dan videos and Rituparna gleefully repeating the wristwork and shoulder springs on court. She watched a lot of men’s tennis on videos and learnt the nuanced dribbles from Bengal’s old masters Badal Bhattacharya and Laltu Guha. She learnt to ‘cut’ the smash keeping the poker face for good measure masking the deception. There’s beauty in that game but it deserves a beastly appetite of ambition and the bull-headedness of strenuous physical effort.

Recalibrating strategy but retaining style 

Shiva Thapa
Age 22
Boxing: Bantamweight

Shiva Thapa is undoubtedly India’s best amateur boxer at the moment. In October this year, the 22-year-old won bronze at the World Championships, only India’s third medal at the tournament. He won a medal of the same colour at the Asian Championships earlier that year. As per AIBA rankings, he is the number two bantamweight, the best by an Indian across weight categories.

Shiva was schooled in the classical long range counterpunching technique. Rather than leading the action, it favoured waiting for the opponent to overextend himself before capitalising with accurate potshots, often while treading backwards. His style was a perfect fit for the old AIBA computerised scoring system.

However, when the amateur scoring system changed in 2013, Shiva’s delayed counterpunching seemed like a throwback to archaic times. The new professional style rules favoured boxers who threw lots of punches and generally gave the appearance of dominating the bout. Indeed even pre-2013, Shiva had seemed to struggle when he was squared off against a brawler, who cut distance and closed in. The new scoring pattern made things worse. “The problem was that when referees see a boxer constantly moving backwards, they think he isn’t being active so they award the round to the boxer who is leading the action,” explains Shiva.

Shiva soon found the ground slipping from under his feet as he endured his first poor season in 2014 —suffering early exits at the Commonwealth and Asian Games.

Rather than entirely junking his counterpunching approach, Shiva retooled his inventory to get his career back on track. While still predominantly relying on boxing from range, Shiva has learned to incorporate elements of simultaneous counterpunching. Unlike delayed counterpunching that waits for the opponent to extend himself out of his guard, a simultaneous counter is delivered at the moment the rival boxer telegraphs his intention. However, it’s a lot harder because the counterpuncher has to stay within range of his opponent and rely mostly on body movements to escape being hit himself.

“It’s even a bit scary because when someone is trying to punch you, your instinct is to step back. But I’ve had to force myself to stay inside range and attack at the same time. I had to practice for months for it to feel comfortable. But it needs a lot of concentration so it’s impossible to do for an entire bout. I could never be a completely attacking boxer because that just isn’t my style. But if I mix up parts in which I attack with my usual style, it becomes very effective,” says Shiva.

Brought up on grass, gliding on artificial turf 

Amir Khan
Age: 22
Hockey: Forward

Amir Khan, probably, won’t stand out in an Indian hockey team that is replete with players who can wield magic. But Amir prefers it that way. And when he finally does his thing, you wonder why he would be so off the radar. Unlike most Indian players, Amir does the little things right — staying in position, marking the opponents, playing the perfect support role to the star cast around him. When he is in the mood, though, he is irresistible, very Arjen Robben-esque.

Like the Dutch footballer, Amir likes to begin his runs on the wings, glide past defenders, cuts inside and finally unleash a powerful shot.

Most defenders know how the script is likely to unfold when Amir is with the ball. But the sheer unpredictability of his game and the pace at which he runs makes it tough for them to stop him in his tracks. It’s a rare combination of fierce speed and slick stick-work, which when got right is very tough to deal with for the opponent.

It’s a technique he claims to have mastered after playing on the grass grounds in Allahabad during the early years of his career. The uneven surface would demand more attention to ball control and running on it improved his body balance. “He ticks almost every box. He has speed, skill, strength and is quite stylish. On his day, he is the most delightful player to watch in the Indian team,” says AK Bansal, who was Amir’s coach during his junior days and then at Kalinga Lancers in Hockey India League last season.

In an era where the art of goal-scoring is becoming more and more robotic — either via training ground set-piece executions or the ‘long ball-deflection’ strategy — Amir’s fluid movement with the ball and ability to use his long strides to generate pace makes him a very exciting player to watch.

Unfortunately, though, such moments from him are a fleeting few during a match. Bansal blames it on lack of confidence and his tendency to get intimidated on field ‘quite easily’. It is seen as the reason for him drifting into the oblivion for nearly six years after turning out for the senior team for the first time. Following his debut as a promising 16-year-old in 2009, Amir got another chance only in 2015, that too as a last-minute replacement for Lalit Upadhyay ahead of the World League. He showed what he is capable of in Raipur.

Yet, it is unlikely that he will be the first person to stand out in the team when they next take the field.

(Reported by Sriram Veera, Shivani Naik, Jonathan Selvaraj and Mihir Vasavda)