What's the new formula for Chennai?

The Madras-Chennai way of cricket promotion has been a pioneering if not unique model. It all started with the M&SM Railway back in the 1930s, when cricketers and hockey players were given employment to facilitate their pursuit of sport unfettered by financial insecurity. CP Johnstone, the Kent and Madras allrounder, continued this trend at Burmah Shell, where, for instance, he nourished the outstanding twin talents of cricket and hockey international-to be MJ Gopalan, whom he first employed to go round with a dipstick to petrol stations, check quality and quantity, and then cycle straight to Chepauk in his hockey shorts to a rousing welcome from his waiting fans.

Sheer love of sport and sportsmen drove the early talent-spotters of Madras to initiate this benign brand of shamateurism. Numerous companies followed suit. Standard Vacuum Oil Company or Stanvac (later Esso), Philips, Southern Railway, Integral Coach Factory, B&C Mills, the Madras Corporation, Spencer & Co. and the Postal Department either hired individual sportsmen of merit or recruited enough of them to enter teams in the local league and other tournaments. Soon the likes of Parry and Co. and State Bank of India went on a hiring binge, the two teams often delighting thousands of spectators by crossing swords in some exciting 30-over finals in the Sport & Pastime (later Hindu) Trophy. Today's corporate sponsors of cricket include India Cements, Chemplast, India Pistons and MRF.

School and college cricket was equally popular and well organised, with tournaments like Pennycuick, Tarapore, Duncan and Chettinad constantly in the headlines. PS High School of Mylapore, St. Bede's of San Thome, Don Bosco of Egmore and Madras Christian College School of Chetpet were prominent school teams with decent grounds. The University Union, Vivekananda, Presidency, Loyola, Pachaiyappa's and AM Jain, were some of the venues where intercollegiate cricket was staged, not to mention Madras Christian College in sylvan surroundings at distant Tambaram, which for a long time had the only turf wickets in the city outside Madras Cricket Club - after Presidency College on the Marina went matting, giving up its celebrated turf in the 1950s.

Unlike schools and colleges, practically the only club with its own cricket ground in the city today is the Madras Cricket Club, historically the home of Madras cricket. Even in the past, the only other city club to own a cricket ground was Madras United Club, launched by Buchi Babu Nayudu, a local aristocrat, who felt slighted by the discriminatory treatment the sahibs meted out to Indian cricketers by denying them the use of the MCC pavilion at matches at Chepauk.

Through history, almost all competitive cricket in Chennai has been played at school and college grounds as well as facilities offered by the railways, the army or the air force, though not all these have always been first-rate grounds.

Today, if club cricket as we knew it in the 1950s and '60s is almost extinct, there is virtually no alternative to the organised form of the game, and rarely a prospect of getting an anonymous Saturday afternoon game as of yore. Increasingly scarce thanks to rapid urbanisation are open fields where kids could freely indulge their sporting interest. Cricket in the Madras of the past was played everywhere on such empty spaces not yet swallowed up by development.

Nor can the official infrastructure cater to the insatiable hunger for the game of ever-increasing numbers of children taking to it. Hence the mushrooming of privately run coaching centres all over the city, and the growing number of tournaments organised among teams named after the coaches. Kedar CA would for example stand for the wards of SJ Kedarnath, a former State Bank of India opener, and Jabbar XI a team of the redoubtable left-hander Abdul Jabbar's pupils.

It is in the 1980s that Chennai's corporate cricket patrons started adopting college cricket grounds and maintaining them as international class facilities, with the cash-strapped sports wings of the institutions welcoming such interventions. Today, most of these have well-kept turf wickets and manicured outfields, state-of-the-art facilities even including soppers and bowling machines, qualified coaches and physios. Add splendid salaries for the players and a professional work ethic, and the result has been a competitive league, with some of the best talent in the country participating - until an increasingly sons-of-the-soil mindset among critics of the system started reducing the number of out-of-state recruits.

One of the constant challenges before Chennai's corporate sponsors has been that of retaining players they have identified young and nurtured, guarding against the depredations of rival recruiters. Though the problem has often been dealt with by unwritten agreements among the competitors not to filch each other's players, such pacts are sometimes breached, too.

A recent threat to the local league has however been posed by the new kid on the block. The intense - occasionally acrimonious - competition among the teams backed by corporates for the famous Palayampatti league and other trophies has been overshadowed by the IPL. Even all-India tournaments like Moin-ud-Dowla and KSCA have lost out to the behemoth, with its instant thrills, razzmatazz and huge television viewership. Divided loyalties, real or perceived, are an unintended fallout of this development, with players gravitating towards Chennai Super Kings, owned by one of the protagonists of the decades-old league drama.

While old-time supporters of the game like State Bank, Reserve Bank, Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank long ago shot their bolt, unable unlike the private sector to offer attractive pay packages to cricketers, even the leading sponsors today have begun to question the value of their continued support of the game at the expense of other CSR initiatives crying out for their attention, after IPL stole the thunder from the local leagues.

With old-fashioned club cricket a thing of the past, the devout fan following of individual teams in the local league too has vanished. It is time for Chennai's indefatigable cricket patrons to put their heads together and come up with a new formula, rather than turn their backs on cricket promotion.