India notebook - Is cricket back in reckoning again?

Corporate India's interest in cricket is slowly being revived. While it is still too early to say if the interest level will match its earlier passion before the match-fixing scandal broke out, industry watchers now feel that cricket is still the best bet especially for the fast-moving consumer goods on the sub-continent.
The scandal did take a heavy tool since April with some of the biggest spenders of the game sitting back to adopt a wait-and-watch attitude.
A number of companies including the Cola giants took the extreme step of removing even star cricketers from their promos while Coke went to the extent of not renewing its contract with Saurav Ganguly.
But India's showing in the Nairobi tournament appears to have forced a change of mind. Both the Cola giants are now showing interest in Ganguly who has impressed both on and off the field. He has now signed on the dotted lines for four companies within the last month: S.Kumars, Sahara India, Cliccricket.com apart from the two-wheeler manufacturers.
ITC, the national team sponsors who had been keeping a low profile so far, has also woken up to its performance during the African Safari.
It re-launched the "Come on India" campaign in the print media on the day of the final, a promo which the company had shelved after India's indifferent showing in the last World Cup.
Ganguly and company failed to respond to the call in the Nairobi final. Fortunately for Indian cricket the corporate world has not taken cognizance of the performance in Sharjah. One sincerely hopes that the showing there does not bring about a rethink. The disaster in the final has yet to sink in though.
Meanwhile Hero Honda – a two-wheeler major which is no stranger to cricket sponsorship is set to enter into a $4 million agreement with the International Cricket Council (ICC) which will make it a major sponsor of the game internationally.
According to industry sources, the deal will give it a co-sponsor status in the next World Cup in South Africa, the next two ICC knockout trophies and the junior World Cup as it was in the last World Cup in England and the knockout event at Nairobi.
According to Atul Sobti, the vice-president of the company, no decision has yet been taken, but "the first right of refusal is with us as we had been co-sponsors of both the events last time. A final decision should come through in a couple of weeks."
After sponsoring the highly successful Hero Cup in Calcutta in 1993, the company has been sponsoring the challenger series for the last three years. Indian captain Ganguly has also been signed up as their brand ambassador last month.

A lot of song and dance is being made over the selection of a foreign cricket coach for the Indian team. And the cause has not been helped by contradictory statements from various sources and the surfacing of forgotten candidates with statements in the media.
One thing is however indisputable. Not all the former cricketers think much of the idea of a foreign coach. Bishen Singh Bedi, former captain and coach, perhaps spoke for most of them when he said: "If we want to have a foreign coach just for the sake of it, no problem. But for me, the move defies wisdom. Will the foreign coach come with a magic wand and transform amateurs into world-beaters?
And it betrays a lack of pride on our part to have a foreigner training the national side.
"There is no dearth of capable coaches in our country. We are not Kenya or Bangladesh. We've been playing Test cricket for more than 65 years and don't need to depend on foreign skill.
"We won the World Cup and have produced great players without foreign help. What we need in India is professional management which will result in all-round growth."
The foreign coach syndrome has also caught up with hockey, with the idea gaining ground after the performance in Sydney. But the position here is different.
The idea has yet to catch the attention of the IHF officialdom. And that will take some time. The IHF has yet to conduct a post-mortem on the Sydney performance.
Here too the idea of a foreign coach appears to be 'foreign' to the Indian situation.
India did well enough for a number of years without the help of a coach from outside. In fact Indian coaches have been preferred to Europeans in many countries and the statement of the South Korean coach after the victory over India in the group matches should help dispel the whole concept of an outsider coaching Indian team. If one remembers correctly the South Korean coach attributed his countrys improvement in the game to his tenure at NIS Patiala in the mid-80s and he mentioned the efforts of Balkishen Singh in this context.

Football is the game where India has been using a foreign coach for quite a few years and look what they have achieved. In fact the standard has gone down. Indias achievements in football were before mid-70s and it was due mainly because of the work put in earlier by Rahim, home-spun in every aspect.

The Delhi Cricket Association has softened its stand in regard to the accused players in the CBI report and included off-spinner Nikhil Chopra in the Ranji Trophy team The Associations stand is that if Hyderabad (Azharuddin), Baroda(Mongia), J&K(Jadeja) and Himachal Pradesh(Ajay Sharma) can include the players, why not Delhi?"