PKL 10: Triumph of Puneri Paltan’s academy system in a lopsided season

A 10th season is a great time to pause and take stock of where a franchise league is headed. More so when you’re among the top three most popular tournaments in a country as sports-crazy as India.

Towards that end, Puneri Paltan’s maiden title triumph neatly ties up, with a bow, everything right with the concept of a franchise-based league for a sport as raw and ancient as kabaddi. It was the triumph of an academy system that has been scouting and moulding talent season after season, no matter the eventual outcome.

Coaches came and went, superstar players made pit stops here in their PKL career journeys, but the budding young talent pool stayed the same, playing in youth leagues and earning their stripes to make the playing 7s in PKL. All that hard work and an unwavering faith in the team has brought the ultimate prize: validation in the form of the league crown.

Thanks to a squad stacked with all-rounders, Puneri Paltan had a team where everyone could do almost anything. The players came at opponents in waves. If an Aslam Inamdar, the franchise’s lead raider and captain, was sent to the bench, in came a Mohit Goyat or a Pankaj Mohite or an Akash Shinde — all academy exports. Defenders could raid, raiders could defend and the Pune side of the mat was never really in a tight spot for too long for most part of the season.

Defensive powerhouse Mohammadreza Shadloui Chiyaneh, who has cemented his place as Fazel Atrachali’s successor as the next big thing in Iranian kabaddi, put on a show that well deserves the moniker of ‘The Showman’, a title long associated with Indian superstar, Rahul Chaudhari. There was no dull moment with Puneri Paltan on court, no matter how brittle the opponent, and that prompted plenty of superlatives on whether this team is the greatest in the league’s history.

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While those arguments will need consistency over a few seasons to be defended or refuted, it’s the glossy gold-plated cover over a season that was disappointingly lopsided. Strong teams got stronger, while the weak ones dipped further into the abyss. Telugu Titans, a side where Chaudhari and others like Siddharth Desai captured the imagination of audiences and pushed the peripheries of possibility in the sport, has looked a pale shadow of its former self. Even the presence of the Indian captain Pawan Sehrawat, who, with 202 raid points and a largely lone-wolf effort, could not salvage much joy for his team and its fans.

Tamil Thalaivas showed sparks of the resilience that carried it to the playoffs last season but fell flat towards the business end. Bengal Warriors, UP Yoddhas and Bengaluru Bulls have unfortunately backed themselves into their own versions of a rut, with their season’s takeaways largely looking similar to editions past. The areas of improvement remain the same, the solutions glaringly obvious. Much of it can be sorted with a mega auction that’ll give teams a fresh chance to rethink their playing identities and the brand of the kabaddi they want to champion going forward.

Ripples in the national scene

Anupam Goswami, league commissioner of Pro Kabaddi, prefers to be pragmatic in celebrating the decade gone by.

“It is momentous, yes, but there is a sober realisation that we’re still in the nascent stage, as are most other sports leagues in India, in our journey. If we get past the 20-year stage and successfully, then we can sit back and with some satisfaction,” he tells  Sportstar.

Alongside the advancement of talent in the league, the ever improving stats of the players and the eyeballs the league is drawing, Goswami underlines the league’s reputation as the biggest feeder line for the national men’s team.

“In order to sustain this, the pipeline of talent needs to be promising — not just domestic but also international. In that aspect, the grooming of domestic talent has been one of the biggest successes of the league,” he explains. “The future of Indian kabaddi is secured for several years to come thanks to the talents we’ve brought into this league with the New Young Players programme. It has helped address and debunk the myth that good players come only from one region. We’ve seen this become more broad-based. We’ve not discovered a diamond in the rough. We’ve just given them a chance to find good coaches who are open to talent irrespective of region.”

Player development has come alongside better monetary conditions for those in the mix.

“Because of us, I believe that the recruitment of kabaddi players to the services to public sector undertakings has been rehabbed. Multiple other kabaddi tournaments have emerged as a result of the larger pull of Pro Kabaddi. In order to make the game aspirational, player salaries (via auction primarily) have increased from Rs 12.8 lakh in the first season (top player price) to Rs 2.6 crore this season. These are not random increases; it has been slow and incremental, growing with the league slowly,” he adds.

Heading the high table

Beyond the national ecosystem, Pro Kabaddi is the biggest and most successful effort in trying to take the sport to the world. The league is in itself aspirational, as evidenced by growing European interest both in viewing and player participation.  E. Prasad Rao, the technical director of the league and a man who has spread the gospel of kabaddi worldwide over the last three decades, underlines the tournament’s role in galvanising ecosystems besides that of India.

“This is what we have to learn from judo and taekwondo. These sports originated in Japan and the nation sent coaches outside to spread the gospel of these sports. The Indian government should do the same,” he tells  Sportstar. “See what the Odisha government has done with hockey. Kabaddi doesn’t need so much if we get the same thing done with it. If — like Japan — we adopt the sport as a culture rather than sport, imagine what it can do for the sport. Taekwondo is in the Olympics today.”

Goswami believes the elected federations and synergy between the league and these entities will go a long way in moving towards these objectives. Elections to the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India (AKFI) were held late last year but coordinated efforts to galvanise the sport’s administration are yet to take shape.

“India, being the home of kabaddi, has a big role to play in the sport’s health internationally.

Our place ebbed a bit due to instability in the AKFI, but an elected federation now should come with more things like bilateral tours etc that can in turn strengthen talents for PKL,” he says.

Iranian head coach Gholamreza Mazandarani told this publication earlier that he had floated an Asian League concept to the international federation, which would involve participation from clubs across kabaddi playing nations in the continent. “Let a thousand flowers bloom, more the merrier,” Goswami declares but his enthusiasm does come with an asterix.

“Core consumption is still in India. It’s not so easy to get things going, as we have learnt. Fundamentals are necessary to be addressed. Let a thousand flowers bloom, we’re all for it. But it’s going to take some doing. That said, just because there’s a challenge, doesn’t mean it’s not attractive,” he concludes.