Chennaiyin welcomes its first ‘home’ player

In the first year, Chennaiyin FC left no stone unturned to appeal to the local community. The customary vanakkam , the club’s name, its logo et al can be seen as attempts to do precisely this. But, the most important thing was missing — a player from the home State of Tamil Nadu.

On Friday, at the ISL player auction/draft, that prayer was finally answered. Dhanpal Ganesh, a 21-year-old from the city, who plays as a central midfielder for Pune FC in the I-league, was picked by the franchise for Rs. 9 lakh.

“It was unexpected,” Ganesh told The Hindu . “I knew I would be picked by some club. But this was not expected. It gives me an opportunity to play in front of my parents, which I have never done. I am very happy.”

Ganesh did his schooling (till eighth standard) in Vyasarpadi, after which he spent four years at the Neyveli Sports Hostel (2004-2007). This was where his footballing journey started.

“Former India international Raman Vijayan came to the hostel and spoke about his journey in football. He was sort of a role model. He had left a secure government job and gone to play at the higher levels. So, I too decided to do that and didn’t consider playing in the Chennai senior division. I went for the trials in Pune and got selected.”

It was a risky move. He came from a humble family. His father used to whitewash houses and his mother was a homemaker. “It was a risk. My parents were against it. My father used to struggle to even buy me boots. I had to leave my studies too. But, I wanted to play for India.”

He finally realised his dream of turning out in national colours when he came on as a substitute in the preliminary round World Cup qualifier against Nepal in March.

Back in 2011, Ganesh was the first player to graduate from the Pune FC academy to the first team. “Manager Ashok Kumar helped me a lot. He was the one who promoted me. I owe him a lot today. I learnt my football skills there and got my first taste of professional football. All the coaches and owners treat me like their son.”

The ISL, though, will be a different ball-game. “I have watched players like Marco Materazzi only on TV. It will be great to play alongside them. But, I need to practise a lot. There is a huge difference between the level we are at and the level at which they play.”

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-sports/chennaiyin-welcomes-its-first-home-player/article7409527.ece

'The team has settled down'

In the past five years India’s journey in the Davis Cup has been topsy-turvy. From the heights of being in the first round of the World Group in 2010 and 2011, the subsequent two years were spent languishing in the regional Asia-Oceania Group I competition. The danger of slipping to Group II and thus into tennis oblivion was there but was warded off. A players’ rebellion against the All India Tennis Association ensued too.

However, in the time since then, much has eased. There is a certain camaraderie in the Davis Cup team that’s hard to miss. The bunch helmed by captain Anand Amritraj and coached by Zeeshan Ali is more of a family, sure about its abilities with each player standing up for the other in times of need. Last September, it punched above its weight and was just a match away from qualifying for the World Group again but lost to Serbia 3-2.

Ten months on, it is up against New Zealand. A win will give it another chance to qualify for the World Group in September. Ahead of the tie, which he termed ‘winnable’, captain Amritraj shared his thoughts with the Sportstar on his time so far.

Excerpts:

Question: What were the goals you set yourself when you took over in September 2013?

Answer: It has pretty much been the same — to get us into the World Group. Last time we were one match away, losing to Serbia 3-2. It was a lot closer than anybody thought we could come. It was a shame that we couldn’t pull it off. So that is still the goal.

What are the improvements that you have seen in these past two years?

Somdev (Devvaraman) has performed as well as he could. He was unbelievable against Korea when we won 4-1. Then against Chinese Taipei. He had an amazing third day against Serbia. Yuki has played well in the past six months. People were tough on him initially. But he had an injury lay-off. Against Serbia his fitness was not 100 per cent. But he has come a long way since then. I am expecting him to be really good this year.

So was it a gamble to play him against Serbia?

It was. But I chose him because it’s hard to replace somebody who is ranked 150 or so. If he had been 300, yes, I would have replaced him. But it was hard to toss him out. Also Saketh Myneni wasn’t in the four. Rohan Bopanna, if chosen, would have given his best shot. But he had not played singles in four years and in best of five matches it is extremely difficult.

What are your views on the talent pool in India?

If you get away from the 28-year-olds and 30-year-olds we have Yuki and Ramkumar. Then come Sumit Nagal, who I have never watched, and Sasi Kumar Mukund. These guys have a long way to go. It’s always tough to jump from juniors to seniors. Unless you are one of the top juniors it is very, very tough. Every 50 spots is a huge jump.

What can you do to improve it?

In the days I played the Nationals had much more importance. So was the grass court Nationals. Not so much today. You need to attract players to play there — either with money or with ranking points. The ATP points are out of question. So if you give the winners say five lakhs, there is some incentive for them to play. Also, if one isn’t in the top-200, you should make it mandatory for them.

Also one needs to understand that you cannot make a life out of playing the Futures tournaments (the lowest rung). You need to get out of the rut as soon as you can. It’s a complete waste of time going to Spain and playing Futures. Rather play the qualifying of some Challenger. Also these days the top players don’t play each other. They don’t want to play sets, let alone matches. It’s done in the US. They get all the players at a place and organise matches. The whole level of play goes up.

Indians have traditionally done well in doubles. Why is that they drift towards the format? Don’t we need quality singles players to make a name in the Davis Cup?

Absolutely! We need two top 100 players to get ahead. I will say that all the youngsters should focus only on singles. There should be no thought about doubles for a good 10 years. No thought at all. Leander (Paes) and Mahesh (Bhupathi) played singles before switching. Rohan too played singles early on. If you want to play doubles, do it later in the career.

You have been the captain for two years now with a good amount of coaching involved. And you also travel to a lot of tournaments, see different players and coaches. How do you see this era of the high-profile coaches?

Who doesn’t have a coach? When Vijay (Amritraj) and I played we were each other’s coach. These days even doubles players have coaches. It is very helpful with the mental aspect.

So are you an advocate of court coaching like in the Davis Cup? The women’s game even had it.

No. It shouldn’t be even in the women’s event. It’s an individual sport. You are playing for yourself. You should be able to figure out things on your own.

http://www.sportstaronnet.com/stories/20150718506103800.htm

Fighting tooth and nail!

Most of the rivalries in sports are way bigger than just the actual games themselves. Geopolitics, economic warfare and even religion play a role and lend to much of the hysteria surrounding them. With the Ashes now round the corner, here is a look at five such rivalries from world over.

India vs. Pakistan (hockey)

Much before the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams gained traction, it was men’s hockey which was in the forefront. Those were the days when the two sub-continental nations ruled world hockey.

The two have a record of facing each other in the first six Asian Games hockey finals. In all they played in seven finals against each other with Pakistan winning six. From 1956 to 1964, they faced-off in three successive Olympic hockey finals. India won gold twice while Pakistan won once. In between all this, the two countries fought three wars too.

USA vs. USSR (Olympics)

From the arms race to the space race to nuclear interests, the Americans and the Russians competed everywhere. Sports was just an extension to it. In the 1972 Munich Olympics basketball final, the Russians won the gold under acrimonious circumstances which included two clock resets. The Americans appealed, but were rejected 3-2 by a five-member jury including Cuba, Poland and USSR! Then in 1980, came the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the Russian hockey team, which had dominated the event in almost every Olympic tournament since 1954, was beaten by a set of amateur and college-level players from the U. S.

Springboks vs. All Blacks (rugby)

These are considered the two best rugby teams in history, dating back to 1921 when the All Blacks beat the Springboks in Dunedin 13-5. Such is the rivalry, it is said that when one plays rugby in South Africa, he always plays the All Blacks. It doesn’t matter where, but your opponent is always an All Black. Though the sides have had periods when they have dominated each other, the overall equation has been fairly balanced. Of the 89 played, New Zealand has 51 wins to South Africa’s 35. Like most, some of the battles were off the field too, like in 1981, when there were protests in New Zealand over the Springboks’ arrival due to the South African government’s policy of apartheid.

Argentina vs. Brazil (football)

It is perhaps the most sporting of rivalries. But like others, its genesis too lies in politics. It dates back to the territorial disputes the two nations inherited from their colonial powers (Spain and Portugal). Now, the South American giants compete fiercely to earn intra-continental bragging rights. In the 1990 World Cup, a Brazilian player accused Argentina’s trainers of giving him bottled water with a harmful substance in it which then came to be known as the “holy water” scandal. But now, with the European leagues in the forefront, the Argentina-Brazil rivalry is more associated with the perennial debate as to who is the greatest player ever? Diego Maradona or Pele?

The U.S. vs. Europe (Ryder Cup golf)

This rivalry is peculiar in the sense that the competition isn’t between two nations but between a nation (U. S.) and a continent (Europe). Named after the English businessman Samuel Ryder who donated the trophy, it first started in 1927 between the U. S. and Great Britain. Beginning 1979, European golfers were allowed to compete with the Brits, largely to shore up the team in light of American dominance. Golf is a sport involving multi-million contracts, corporate interests and huge TV deals. Yet, such is the pedestal at which the Ryder Cup is placed, that the winners don’t get a single penny as prize money.

http://www.sportstaronnet.com/stories/20150718504601900.htm

Every step you take

On the eve of the 2012 UEFA Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, Petr Cech, the Chelsea goalkeeper, was given a two-hour DVD of every penalty kick that Bayern had taken since 2007. It was enough to calculate the probability of which way the ball would be placed when a penalty was taken. Chelsea went on to win the match following a penalty shoot-out and thereafter Cech said, “Six penalties the right way and I saved three, so basically the homework was very good.”

This March, at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, Michael Niemeyer, Bayern’s head of match analysis, said of Pep Guardiola, the famed former manager of Barcelona and the current Bayern boss, “As he came to Bayern, the first thing he said was: ‘The match analysis department is the most important department for me.’ The second thing was: ‘I see a big part of my work in the auditorium.’ The auditorium is the place where he has video sessions.”

Football, as a sport, has long held out against numbers. Heart, soul, and the desire to win have always been cherished and rightly so, but the theoretical dimension of the game has been tough to take into account. The two instances above show that things are finally changing. In the words of Chris Anderson and David Sally who wrote The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know about Football is Wrong, “The datafication of life has started to infiltrate football”.

Charles Reep, a wing commander with the Royal Air Force, was the one who started it. In 1950, he logged data for a match involving Swindon Town. He is said to have noted 147 attacks by Swindon, extrapolated from there and concluded that close to 99 per cent of attacks were failures. He may have been right or wrong but he proved to be a pioneer, going on to log data for more than 2,000 matches.

Kick off

The real number crunching, however, took off only in the mid-1990s with the arrival of companies such as Opta and Prozone and their high-end technology. What is the percentage of goals scored from corners? What are the pass completion rates? How effective are throw-ins? What do teams do in the first few seconds after losing or winning the ball? What is the recovery time for a player between matches? Opta records something close to 1,500-2,000 events, of which the above is just a microcosm.

“Every step on a football pitch is measured now,” Roberto Martínez, the current Everton manager, told The Guardian. “We monitor each session with GPS and heart-rate profiles. From a physical point of view, the most significant stats are probably the number of sprints, the sprint distance and the amount of high-intensity efforts a player gets through. We look at these through the season and they give us a good indication of how fatigued a player is and the recovery he needs.”

As a discipline, analytics is slowly shaping how teams are built, how games are strategised, and how prospective players are scouted. Football now increasingly deals with abstracts. Every part of the pitch and every area off it is broken down and analysed. What it does is to destroy preconceived notions and eliminate experience bias. Someone who has been in the game all his life might not be able to spot everything. There is finally the realisation that metrics help you see the unseen. And this has been proven by Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal, who studied economics and mathematics and turned to a fitness ace to solve his problems; by Sally and Anderson, behavioural economist and professor of politics, respectively, who wrote The Numbers Game; and by the maths wizards whom Billy Beane appointed to revolutionise baseball.

Getting the numbers right

Simon Kuper, a Financial Times columnist and co-author of Soccernomics noted how Manchester City winning the English Premier League title had much to do with data. “The analysts persuaded the club’s then manager Roberto Mancini that the most dangerous corner kick is the inswinger, the ball that swings towards goal. Mancini had long argued (strictly from intuition) that outswingers were best. Eventually he capitulated and City scored 15 goals from corners, the most in the Premier League.” City won the League on goal difference.

However, much depends on how one uses the data. Technology is such that when one buys into it, he or she does so completely. There are no half measures. The trick lies in what to see and how to see. As Nate Silver, the master American psephologist who was once a baseball analyst, said, “Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.”

In 2011, when Liverpool signed Andy Carroll for a whopping £35 million, it raised quite a few eyebrows. The then director of football Damien Comolli thought that Carroll, who had the highest conversion rate from crosses, in combination with Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing, both of whom had the best passing numbers and a high percentage of winning the ball in the opponents’ penalty box, would bring in a goal rush. But he didn’t see the data that said that crosses are not always an effective way to score goals. The plan as a whole was a spectacular failure.

What this calls for is more refined metrics. No one thinks that intuition will ever go out of the game. The players are the ones who win you matches. But data, by being dispassionate, helps them maximise their talent. It is said that nothing has altered the way football has been played in almost a century except for the modern-day offside rule. In the years to come, analytics might be the next game-changer.

http://www.thehindu.com/sunday-anchor/sunday-anchor-every-step-you-take/article7386976.ece

Rapid evolution

No other professional sport has integrated technology into its world as well as tennis. Playing surfaces are ever newer. The International Tennis Federation recognises 160 of them. Ball-tracking technology, medical technology, social media interfaces, advancements in broadcasting have all revolutionised the way the game is played and consumed. It is evolving so rapidly that the 2014 Rules of Tennis have been amended to permit International Tennis Federation (ITF)-approved devices to be used during play. While the public, on one hand, focuses on the Roger Federers, Rafael Nadals and Novak Djokovics, the role of technology at the backend is unmistakably huge. Not for nothing did English novelist Martin Amis say, “a beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.”

Yet, it is a fact that tennis is a sport full of conservatives. Players have always been slow to change. Old habits die hard. And the tension between the old and new, a feature of many a value system around the world, is glaring. Ask the old hand, he will decry the role of chance and luck. What used to be four radically different surfaces (the four Grand Slams) are now almost homogenous due to technology, he will say. Why should the same players with the same set of skills be rewarded again and again, he will ask. Why is that fate and human failings decide less and less and instead computers and sensors have a say more and more, he will wonder.

But everything has to move with the times. There will be pros and cons but evolution is inevitable. Here is a look at some of the technological advancements in tennis:

Racquets

It was wooden first. Then it became steel. Steel then turned into carbon and now graphene seems to be the new trick. American Jimmy Connors, when he won the Wimbledon in 1974, was the first to put the metal racquet in public minds. Billie Jean King did win the 1967 U.S. Open with metal but later returned to wooden racquets.

When Connors did what he did, it divided opinion. The wooden racquets were 65 square inches in size. The carbon ones can now go up to 137. There was once something called the ‘sweet spot’ and it required a bit of talent to make contact with the ball at that precise point. Now, the whole of the racquet is a sweet spot. Are players the primary determinants of a match result anymore is the underlying question.

But what technology did do was to customise the racquet for an individual player and increase the potential for improvement. It is no longer the look and feel of the equipment but the level of detail to the last grain that decides which racquet gets used. The latest among these is the ‘Babolat Play’ where sensors equipped inside the handle measures movement and vibrations from where a ball hits the string bed and captures data about every type of stroke. The data can then be transmitted to a smartphone or computer and analysed.

Hawk-Eye

One area where the traditionalists and the modernists seem to converge rather easily is on the use of Hawk-Eye which allows a player to challenge an official line call. It traces the arc of a bouncing ball, maps the path the ball takes and establishes whether it bounced in or out. It even takes into account how the ball skids and changes shape during contact with the ground. At an error threshold of 3.6 mm, it is almost perfect. The skeptics initially said it would interrupt the flow of the game and take out the human element. On the contrary, what it does is to place that human element in the players’ realm. In allowing just two unsuccessful challenges in each set, the interruption is minimum and the players need to know when and what to challenge, and this decision making is now considered an art in itself.

Biomechanics and video analysis

A tennis stroke is a thing of sophistication. Early research involved only the serve. Ground strokes were secondary. But with players getting all the more fitter, rallies extending, the need was for a well-rounded game. This is where biomechanics and video analysis come into the picture. How does one develop power and control? What is the stretch-shortening cycle of muscles? How much should one vary the pace, spin and direction of the ball? A plethora of video analysis systems are in place for the same. Why, players scout each other on YouTube these days and especially in Davis Cups when one draws obscure opponents, this is a God-send.

Low-compression tennis balls

Something that changed the fundamental way tennis was played was the introduction of low-compression tennis balls. These are lightweight balls that are easy to hit. The flight of the ball is slower and the bounce true, giving more time for one to play the ball and lengthen the rallies. This has come under severe criticism from some quarters for making certain aspects of the game like the volley and the drop shot rare and thereby making the game a one-dimensional baseline slugfest. But what is also true is that it really helps a youngster shape his strokes better and gives them more time to control and play the shots.

Did you know?

The net cord sensor’s first-ever version introduced in 1974 was a pick-up from the electric guitar — a mechanical effort (of ball hitting the net) being converted into electric charge (picked up by sensors).

Around 35 km of cables are wired through Melbourne Olympic Park during the Australian Open.

At Wimbledon, spare balls are kept at 20 degrees centigrade at the side of the court to keep them in perfect condition.

http://www.sportstaronnet.com/stories/20150711503801400.htm