Articles from the Times UK

Article from the The Times UK.


Britain's kabaddi skill might mean we finally beat India at their own game
Army seeks to conquer all at kabaddi


In 1954 a cricket team from the fledgeling nation of Pakistan beat England at Old Trafford, inaugurating an era in which England would be thrashed at the various sports it had invented.

Now, the Army is engaged in an ambitious programme to master an ancient Indian sport in what appears to be a subtle attempt to strike back.

At a gymnasium in Larkhill, Wiltshire, a small squad meets to practise kabaddi, a game as old as the Hindu scriptures, the sport of Indian princes and - according to literature - a pastime of the Buddha himself.

First introduced to these isles by Channel 4, which showed it on Sunday mornings in the early 1990s, the sport gained a small but devoted following. It appears to be a violent form of tag combining rugby and Graeco-Roman wrestling in which one man regularly takes on seven opponents while holding his breath and chanting kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi - ideally suited, perhaps, to the Army.

Ashok Das, the Army’s team coach, believes that his players will form the nucleus of an English national team that will challenge India’s dominance.

He made this prediction on Indian national television, during the team’s debut tour, during which it narrowly lost to an Indian Army team filled with international players.

“Everyone was praising them,” he said. “They were worried that England will start beating India. They said to me, ‘You are Indian, aren’t you ashamed to do this to your country?’ I said, ‘I was Indian, now I am British. I have to pay back my country. They are not winning at football, now they will win at kabaddi’.”

He has remained a brilliant optimist ever since, despite setbacks that would have levelled lesser men. “The problem is, sometimes the players get sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.

The team was first assembled in July 2007, after Das persuaded army recruitment officers that a kabaddi team could be a powerful recruitment tool in British Asian communities.

Colonel Paul Farrar, deputy head of Army Recruiting, saw “a really good game . . . something the British Army ought to look at seriously”. It also needs no equipment, so can be played wherever troops are deployed.

Orders to form a team landed on the desk of Second Lieutenant Nick Burdick, at 14 Regiment, the Royal Artillery, in Larkhill. He thinks it might have been easier to recruit a team “if it had a different name, like Murderball or Bulldog”, but in the end he walked out of his office, picked up a group of soldiers and told them they were going to be in a kabaddi team.

Last summer, the team beat Italy. A return match will take place in Aldershot next month, while overtures have arrived from the Indian Border Security Force, to play the Army next year.

Colonel Farrar believes the momentum of the team is growing, with the Army Physical Training Corps taking an interest in its martial qualities. He recently met a soldier from India, recruited via the Army’s Foreign and Commonwealth scheme, who said that the kabaddi team had convinced him to join up. “It is definitely helping recruitment among British Asian communities too,” he said.

“I have been in the Army for 35 years and never heard of kabaddi,” he said. “Perhaps in another 30 years we will look back on these 18 months and say, ‘This was when it all started’.”