The biggest landmine in sports

Argentina just squeaked into the last flight leaving to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup. Phew, what a relief!

The curse and blessing of the Argentinean team has been its coach, El Diego. A blessing for obvious reasons and a curse because it has now been laid out bare to the world that a good player need not always be a good coach. In fact, some the best coaches in the world in sports were seldom good players. Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger had forgettable football careers as players. Jean Todt peaked as co-driver in his racing days, never really achieving anything significant during his stint as a (co)driver. On the other side of the spectrum are cases of players-par-excellence turned coaches-par-nightmare: Kapil Dev, Alain Prost, and Diego Maradona until recently to name a few.

To succeed as a player requires a different skill set than it does to succeed as a coach. For long, I often wondered that if Sachin was the best batsman in the world, why was Anshuman Gaekwad his coach? I had never even heard of Gaekwad’s batting prowess. Or why did a Tiger Woods or a Roger Federer need a coach? Being a coach means bringing out the best in a player, or a team. That often involves placing belief, trust and transferring motivation and bringing about the discipline to develop the ‘balls’ to go out there and succeed. These things need a third party to be involved even with the best players on earth. The lack of understanding of this concept is probably the biggest landmine in all of sports.

Up on skimming through a couple of books recently, my friend noticed that baseball and basketball coaches in the US were well respected, often quoted and remembered even after their prime years. Similar was the case with European football coaches. Maybe in India, we should start doing the same too. Our coaches (only the deserving ones), in any sport, need to be recognized way beyond what they get in the deal now. And we may just have solved one of the problems in the eternal question: “Why can’t a nation of a billion bring home a few Olympic Golds.”