Gopi Chand: A victim of politics?

The Badminton Association of India’s decision to form two separate panels of coaches for senior and junior shuttlers, in principle, is the way forward if we have to ensure a consistent supply of talent to the senior squad in coming years. But the circumstances under which the decision has been taken and the past experience with this exercise of having different sets of coaches handling the two groups only ends up raising more questions about the effectiveness of the decision in the near future. It is no secret that the decision has been taken to clip chief national coach P Gopi Chand’s wings and rehabilitate coaches loyal to the new dispensation. And that is where the decision makers have defeated the very purpose behind the initiative. [caption id=“attachment_28142” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Gopichand has managed to achieve a lot in his stint as head coach”] [/caption] Till October 2010, a separate panel of coaches worked for junior shuttlers under Sports Authority of India coach Sanjeev Sachdeva and camps were held in Cochin and Ludhiana for about 160 days in a year. Talk to any player who attended those camps, and the general reaction from most would be that they dreaded attending the camps because they were made to slog for no reason and very little work being done on their strokes and tactics. In fact, when yours truly had asked one of India’s leading junior shuttlers about the contribution of the accompanying coach, the reply was startling. “Woh humhe sirf itna bolte the ki lead lo aur sambhal ke raho (Take the lead and maintain it). Baki sub hum hi sochte the (We had to plan our own strategies),” he said. The same coach will be one of the senior members of the coaching panel that is most likely to comprise SAI coaches from various centres and a few state level coaches who are in the good books of the bosses. One such name, Aparna Pandey, has already been introduced in the coaching panel for the Badminton Asia Youth Under-19 championship to be held in Lucknow from July 2-10. The lady I am told hails from Allahabad and has been doing “tremendous” work in creating players from Uttar Pradesh. However, an effort to find more about her coaching methods from players of the state elicited a standard reply “Who is Pandey”. The second problem with the decision is that the ‘junior panel’ will be working with the under-19 boys who are already challenging the seniors and some of them have cemented their berths in the senior squad. Taking them out of the senior camp and putting them in the junior camp would hardly serve any purpose since they will not have any good sparring partners and the continuity in training will be lost. Also, the BAI needs to understand that during the 4-year tenure of Gopi Chand, Indian badminton has achieved many a milestones, including two Commonwealth Gold medals, the maiden qualification for the Uber Cup finals and a quarterfinal finish in the Sudirman Cup. In these years, Gopi Chand has created a system to broaden the talent base with long-term training camps and there is no point in creating a parallel system just to rein him in, since most people think that he had become too powerful during VK Verma’s tenure as president. If the BAI is really serious about creating a system that can produce future stars, they should ask Sachdeva, who will again head the junior panel, to concentrate on the under-15 and under-13 players instead of wasting time in one-upmanship.