India’s Virat Kohli would have scored at least two centuries and three fifties in the five Tests against England if his girlfriend, Anushka Sharma, had not come with him on the tour. It is all the fault of the UK Immigration department for giving her a visa and must certainly have been integral to some Machiavellian plot hatched by MI 5 to sabotage India’s batting.
That is the assumption by the BCCI for his dismal performance. In keeping with the great national obsession for bans this august body has now decided to ‘ban-ish’ wives and girlfriends (WAGs) for the rest of the series. Of all the idiotic options for reasoning out why the Indians got whupped this must rank as the winner by a mile. The team managers say they were disturbed when they heard she was accompanying him on the tour, a statement that targets BBCI Secretary Sanjay Patel who had given the permission. What rot. She is a grown up, independent woman, you can’t tell her whether to visit the UK or not.
Where do these people live they don’t know that groupies chase sports people in every corner of the world, you think finding a date is a problem for them?
Not that this is the first time that sport and sex are at loggerheads. Widely quoted are two classic statements. The first from Plato in 444 BC says, “Olympic competitors before races should avoid sexual intimacy.”
Nearly five centuries later, in 77 AD, Pliny the Elder knocked Plato for a loop saying “Athletes when sluggish are revitalized by lovemaking.”
And this war has been going on since then. Just a few days earlier tennis star Novak Djokovic responded to criticism that his game had gone on the skids following his marriage by saying he was content and tennis was no longer priority one. He had touched the stars and after a while it is a bit of same old, same old. Fair enough but you really cannot expect young men to spend a three month tour celibate especially when there is nothing happening for days between matches. You think pining and spending hours worrying about ‘what’s going on back home’ is going to make you a better performer.
Sure, having women enter your life can knock your standing off the pedestal. Ask Tiger Woods and Oscar Pistorius how it ended for them. But that sort of extreme situation can also occur in the stuffy corporate Chairman’s office and scandal is not limited to sports. For sportspersons it is also a day at the office and if they want to canoodle after hours so be it. They are hardly likely to be more robust and vigorous through denial, having cold showers or spending hours on Skype.
And if you really look at this issue dispassionately, each to his own. Mohammed Ali abstained for a week before a bout. Then again, no less a player than the legendary Joe Namath advocated just the opposite before a big game. Even the medical profession has stepped into the fray but found little co-relation between sport and sex. The one book I located on the subject (I don’t know how authoritative it is) is Sex Before Athletic Competition: Myth or Fact by exercise physiologist Tommy Boone. Boone suggested pre-sport sex actually aids male athletes by raising testosterone levels. He goes on to say, “Coaches demand abstinence without any serious research to support them, and there simply isn’t anything in medical literature to support their stand.”
In Kohli’s case, it is more Indian prudery than prudence because it was a girlfriend and not a wife and now the defense is that they are about to get married which is why the BCCI gave him permission. Besides he had been sworn to secrecy and had promised to be discreet. Sounds really silly and infantile.
Then we have a BCCI spokesman put the icing on this cake by saying, "Unlike football, Test cricket is played for eight hours. And when the mind is on picking and dropping friends, the result will be visible on the field itself. Off-field activities definitely play on the mind."
Inanity at its worst from this mind reader.
