Five years and six seasons into its existence, Pro Kabaddi has transformed the sport. How has the league managed this? Here are three things that have made a difference:
Tweaks in play
As a spectacle, kabaddi banks on the suspense surrounding the simple act of the touch — it renders dramatic the movements and the body language of the players. For a viewer, the play is cautious before the touch — the raider sneaky, the defenders wary. And desperate after — the raider to escape, the defenders to hold him.
Suspense condensed is drama amplified, then.
This, the league has done, says its technical director, Prasad Rao.
“The 30-second limit for a raid wasn’t there before,” says Rao. “Now, a raider’s entry, his settling, and scoring should be done in 30 seconds, which is very difficult. Thirty seconds is nothing. By the time he’s done with his entry and settling the path, 12-15 seconds are over. So, there’s big pressure on the raider. And that has made it exciting.”
The do-or-die raid, another league introduction, further adds to the urgency. It came about after teams appeared to use successive empty raids as a delaying tactic. Now, it’s mandatory for a side to score after making two empty raids in a row or risk losing the raider and conceding a point.
The super raid (three or more raid points) and the super tackle (executed by three or fewer defenders, earning two points instead of one) are Pro Kabaddi innovations, too.
The changes have contributed to the game’s pace quickening, which has suited the younger generation’s power play more than the senior players’ largely tactical play.
The review system
On the face of it, a mechanism for reviewing decisions seems essential to the sport: it’s a rapid, alternating game of small margins; errors in judgment cost teams dearly.
“The first season, we started without the review system,” says Rao. “Then, after observing some matches and the way the people reacted to them, I thought it up and broached it to the technical committee.
“They were initially hesitant. They felt the pause in play would slow down the pace of the match. But if you’ve been watching PKL, you will know that no team wins all the matches. It’s almost like all teams are equal. So, mistakes [in refereeing] badly affect the teams. We first tried it [the review system] in the playoffs of the first season.”
The idea has worked so well that it has inspired other, ingenious versions. “At a municipality school in Delhi, I saw the students nominate a person as the reviewer!” says Rao. “If there was a doubt, he/she was signalled immediately.”
Leila Seifi, an Iranian referee who was in charge of a few matches last season, says it helps to officiate with the knowledge that teams can review decisions.
“Not that it dilutes our responsibility,” she says. “But when after the match you get to know that you made a wrong decision that influenced the result, you just wish there was something that could have been done.”
Analytics
For a league that has grown largely on the strength of its phenomenal viewership, the way the television product is presented is critical. And league commissioner Anupam Goswami says this is “defining the way kabaddi is understood or interpreted”.
A STAR Sports spokesperson, who works with content and programming for the league, spoke on condition of anonymity about “forming the narrative”, or simply, “story-telling”.
“We don’t have technology that’s custom-made for kabaddi,” he says. “There has been no technological intervention in the sport for the longest time. Before 2014 [season one], the players did not know what their personal milestones were... career data, you know. There was no ready repository of any sort or records for us to build the profiles of the players we were keen on establishing. We had nothing to build on.
“Kabaddi was a sport that no company had looked at and given any technological support to. Till recently, whatever technology we’ve been using for the broadcast as well as story-telling, it’s all been retrofitted. Technology that existed in some other sport, we retrofitted and made it work for our sport. Most of the times, we’ve made it work successfully. The times these innovations didn’t work for us, we dropped them.”
The content and programming team is now also involved in defining the player’s performance metrics. This season, the league tied up with Catapult, an Australia-based provider of sports performance solutions, to use its heart-rate monitor on the players, something that is flashed on TV during matches.
But why heart rate?
“I think it [heart rate] is one of the key performance indicators that a common man easily understands,” says the STAR Sports spokesperson. “I mean it’s the most basic level of story-telling one understands. You see normal people wearing devices to track their heart rate. It shows that’s something people are interested to know.
“Broadly speaking, we are on an intellectual pursuit to understand the physiology and the rigours of a kabaddi player. We are also trying to figure out how different players react differently to stress. We want to have a sample to probably engage a data science company or a data scientist to read through and share some insights.”
Rao says it is the first time in the history of kabaddi that a player’s physiological components are measured during a match.
The franchises get access to all the data after the match. This direction, or intellectual pursuit, has led to teams hiring full-fledged support staff, including analysts.
Jaipur Pink Panthers owner Abhishek Bachchan said the team has had an analyst for four seasons now. Tamil Thalaivas appointed one this season.
The work of the analyst includes studying videos of opposition raiders to evaluate their strengths, weaknesses and tendencies. Armed with this insight, teams can better deal with raiders, who, in turn, are forced to adapt and evolve.
What’s more, Rao says the players are earning enough to independently engage professionals (physiotherapists, psychologists, analysts) during the off-season.
When league commissioner Goswami says, “PKL has totally transformed player training and management, and sports medicine for kabaddi”, it’s hard to disagree.
A lot of the innovations and changes, moreover, have found their way into the sport at large — Rao, who is the technical director of the International Kabaddi Federation in addition to his role with Pro Kabaddi, has played a part in this.
“The old kabaddi is finished,” says Rao. “Now, it’s a different kabaddi: modern and scientific.”
