Hinterland Heartbreak ; As Cricket Celebrates Small Town Heroes, in One Corner of India, the Future of a Generation of Juniors Players Is Left in Limbo for More Than Three Long Seasons by a Political Spat Within the Bcci

India Today › March 06, 2006

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Summary

The flavour of Indian cricket's new season are the game's small- town heroes-M.S. Dhoni from Ranchi, R.P. Singh from Rai Bareilly, Piyush Chawla from Aligarh and Suresh Raina from Ghaziabad. At a time when India is celebrating these fiesty fighters, another backwater generation has become a footnote in a tussle that the BCCI has ignored for more than three seasons. When the state of Jharkhand was created out of Bihar in 2002, the BCCI recognised the Jharkhand Cricket Association largely due to the location of its headquarters in Jamshedpur-the traditional home of cricket in undivided Bihar.

In Patna, a scramble for the spoils broke out as three rival associations sought recognition from the BCCI. It has been nearly four years and the BCCI has not been able to make its pick. "There is no life in our cricket now," says Keshav Kumar, a 17-year-old all- rounder good enough to play for East Zone in the zonal national under-19s. Kumar, from Patna, is actually one of the lucky ones. He plays within the system as he is registered in Jharkhand and plays at its ODI centre, Tatanagar's Keenan Stadium.

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Hinterland Heartbreak ; As Cricket Celebrates Small Town Heroes, in One Corner of India, the Future of a Generation of Juniors Players Is Left in Limbo for More Than Three Long Seasons by a Political Spat Within the Bcci

After three seasons of bickering, the rival groups-the Bihar Cricket Association (Patna) headed by Lalu Prasad, the ...

See the full content of this document