Spreading the canvas did the trick, says Amitabh Choudhary

Over the last ten years, cricket in Jharkhand has been on the rise. Quality youngsters have emerged in the wake of Mahendra Singh Dhoni's sensational international career, a world-class international stadium has been built in Ranchi and the domestic team has improved by leaps and bounds. Amitabh Choudhary, the president of the Jharkhand State Cricket Association, has widely been credited with putting structures in place and supervising the rise of Jharkhand cricket. In this chat with Wisden India, he speaks about the administrative changes that have yielded fruit, and the challenges encountered while effecting those changes. Excerpts:

Before entering cricket administration, you were an IPS officer - two completely unrelated fields. What prompted the shift?

In 1999, the BCA (Bihar Cricket Association), as it was known then, was to conduct its elections, and it was not doing what it was supposed to. That reflected in the performance of the Bihar team. In fact for 70 years, till 1999 - and if I say that today, you'll find it incredulous, given that we have the likes of MS Dhoni, Varun Aaron and Saurabh Tiwary playing for Jharkhand - there wasn't a single player from the state who had gone anywhere near playing for India. Ramesh Saxena was an import, I'm not talking about imports. Something was badly wrong, and that emanated from the fact that the administration itself was anomalous, in the sense that it was dominated by some groups of people. It was called the BCA, but it had hardly anything to do with Bihar Cricket Association. So I decided to join the fray. I lost the first time, in 1999, but thereafter, things have changed.

When you were first elected president of the BCA in 2002, what were the challenges you faced? Jharkhand the state was just two years old then.

There were many challenges. They are never-ending; we're still facing them. First, the confusion created by truncated Bihar at every imaginable forum, including the various courts - even the Supreme Court of India. They contended that they were the Bihar Cricket Association, when the fact remains that the undivided BCA, in substance and content, was concentrated in what today is Jharkhand, and that the headquarters was also in Jharkhand. Therefore, their contention was bogus. Yet, it is a contention which is likely to impress prima facie. We had to do the dirty job of clearing this mess in everyone's minds in every forum. That was the first challenge.

Second, Tata Steel (TISCO) had dominated cricket in Bihar for 70 years, and nobody had ever challenged them. Bihar Cricket Association at Jamshedpur was, if I may say so, a synonym of Tata Steel. It was up to them (Tata Steel) to nominate someone as president. It was also up to them to agree to somebody else as secretary. The president had never been anyone else but a Tata Steel man. Therefore, every adversity for us, apart from the natural ones, was created by them.

The Keenan Stadium (in Jamshedpur) was in their control, and as was bound to happen, they tried their best to get the association back to where it was. They did not succeed. Among the various attempts they made, they put up the then home minister against me as a candidate in 2006. Though he lost, they tried to spite us by withholding the Keenan Stadium even for international matches, and as many as three matches had to be shifted elsewhere. It was a direct result of the fact that their ultimate weapon, which was putting up the home minister as a candidate, failed. Thankfully though, it made us stand on our own feet, at least to begin with.

The JSCA International Stadium has hosted a One-Day International, a few IPL matches and now the Champions League. What went into the making of this stadium?

It took six-seven years. To build the stadium, we needed land, and it took a great deal of trouble before we managed to get it. Once we finally got the land, it was very inhospitable territory. It was barren, and didn't have much of alluvial soil. It had a huge amount of hard rocks - you can't cut them, you have to blast them. In the first survey, the estimate was of 200 cubic metres of hard rock. Eventually, it was 100 times that, and its implication on cost was huge.

Jharkhand cricket has come on tremendously in the last few years. What would you put that transformation down to?

The moment you spread the canvas - it's a tedious, testing job but the moment you spread it away from the cities and to the remote areas - you're bound to get results. We increased the number of tournaments. We have about 60 state-level tournaments today, and for every age-group, we have no less than a half a dozen tournaments. When I took over, there used to be some ten tournaments in all. Just ten.

Also, the main thing was instilling confidence in our players. The confidence that, if they have substance, nobody will ignore them. Believe me, it's so easy today to accept Dhoni as India's captain. But recall the fact that, when he was trying to make his debut, there were two wicketkeepers already playing for India. Both were younger to him, both had acquitted themselves very well, and both came from traditionally strong lobbies of cricket - Dinesh Karthik from South Zone, and Parthiv Patel from West Zone. There was no reason to look for a third 'keeper.

We instilled that confidence amongst our players and that made the difference. It wasn't the case earlier. Otherwise, for 70 years, we had one import from Delhi, supposedly from Bihar, playing for India. So we stopped imports, unless other reasons predicated that. That gave our players confidence, and it produced results on the field too. We defeated Bombay on the way to winning the Vijay Hazare Trophy one-day tournament (March 2011). We demolished Gujarat in the finals. So, it's not just a structure process, it is a mental process as well. It's all in the mind.

How will you maintain and improve the current level of cricket in Jharkhand?

We'd like to better it, but certainly maintain this current level to start with. Now, we fortunately have the facilities. We don't have to beg people for grounds and other favours. We have everything now. So, it should be easier to continue to do the things we have started doing, such as elaborate tournaments, short-listing people and pushing them to go for a higher benchmark. The association was initially not a participatory committee. Today, it is. For example, even if any two key individuals are missing temporarily, the machine will still function. I'll be out today and tomorrow, but there is a system, and it's now a whole committee. It is an organic entity now, instead of a one-man driven committee.

The recent controversies that have embroiled cricket in India, how have they affected the image of the sport?

If you remember what Dhoni said - and he proved it later on - it hasn't really affected the game or the players. It may have affected a few people, a few players did it and it has affected a few. But on a larger level, I don't think it has affected either the players or the game.