The TV schedule of May 5, 1991 was suitably miscellaneous for the age. Sunday Grandstand offered up its melange — Badminton Horse Trials, motorcycling — followed by highlights of Harlequins’ extra-time win over Northampton in the Pilkington Cup final, and the World Snooker Championship final between John Parrott and Jimmy White.
Over on Channel 4, the “home of sporting exotica” that had housed NFL and hipster Grandstand in Trans World Sport, a new game took the place of sumo in the line-up. For half an hour at 6pm, it was Punjab versus West Bengal. Thirty-four years later, the British public can watch kabaddi in person.
A week-long World Cup begins in the West Midlands on Monday — the first time the event has been held outside Asia. England, Hungary, India, Italy, Poland, Wales, Hong Kong, Germany, Scotland and the United States will compete across men’s and women’s competitions at venues in Birmingham, Coventry, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
Few activities arouse cult interest like kabaddi; a full-contact team endeavour with millennia-old origins, in which you have to hold your breath and chant the sport’s name. Tag with wrestling, perhaps, where raiders encroach on enemy territory and try to return home after touching an opponent to acquire points. No equipment, just space and wits, in a test of stamina, footwork and decision-making.
That the World Cup will be in England is largely down to Ashok Das. They call him “the Kabaddi Daddy”. As the founder of the England Kabaddi Association, Das has long acted as evangelist. He used to drive from Birmingham to Wiltshire twice a week to teach the Army, and flew to Bergamo for the weekend to introduce it to Italy. “He was the one who came to Poland for the first time,” Michal Spiczko, the president of Kabaddi Poland, says.
On a Tuesday night, a fortnight out from the tournament, some of England’s men are laying out the jigsaw mats in the corner of the gymnasium at the University of Wolverhampton’s Walsall campus. When the session ends, a woman walks in for recreational badminton and inquires as to what she has just seen. “My husband said it was kabaddi!” she replies.
It is a niche pursuit for most of the world but not in India, where the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) is second to cricket’s IPL, with the usual mix of billionaires, conglomerates and Bollywood stars — including GMR Group, the new owners of Hampshire Cricket Club — as franchise owners.
At the PKL auction, where the most expensive player has gone for more than £230,000, each franchise selects between two and four overseas players. While Iranians are the highest-rated foreigners, Europeans have gone to PKL for learning experiences: Spiczko, a software programmer who came from American football, with Bengaluru Bulls in 2015, and England’s Felix Li and Yuvraj Pandeya at Dabang Devils in 2023-24.
Most World Cup participants will be amateurs. At the 2016 tournament, the US squad was an assortment of bodybuilders and rappers, mainly from the same Florida university. England’s men’s captain this week is Hardeep “Harry” Singh, a medical sales rep who has taken five days of annual leave.
Yugesh and Sunandan Walia regret that modern kabaddi is a sanitised version of the rustic fare that entranced Channel 4 from Calcutta and Delhi in the 1990s. The brothers run a production company called Endboard and pitched an idea to the sports commissioning editor, Mike Miller, about hockey. “As we were finishing our coffee, he just casually mentioned that he was looking for something to replace sumo in the schedules,” Yugesh says. “Sunandan and I looked at each other and suddenly kabaddi came to mind. We explained the rules to Mike and he didn’t believe it. ‘Really? Is this a game?’
“We found out there was a match going on the following weekend in Huddersfield, so he flew up. Unfortunately it was a different style of kabaddi. It was the big circular style that only Punjabis play, and they were really there only to have a good time. There was a lot of booze going around in the car boots, and very soon it was fisticuffs.” Fortunately for them, it didn’t put Miller off.
Kabaddi was a rural sport, without high-profile tournaments ready for overseas production. The brothers organised a competition, pitting together the likes of West Bengal Police and Indian Railways, building control rooms and commentary facilities. “After the first episode was transmitted, Mike Miller called us,” Yugesh says. “He said, ‘I won my bet.’ We said, ‘Eh? What bet?’ And he said, ‘I had a bet with my colleagues to say that it would get more than 1 million viewers.’ And after the first episode, he commissioned the second series.
“We still get emails sometimes, saying, ‘Is this going to be shown again?’ When I found out about the World Cup, I did write to Channel 4 and say, ‘Look, it’d be worth at least showing a couple of episodes, even if it’s just the finals from the second series,’ but I never heard back.”
There are two codes of kabaddi, related to the shape of the playing area. This is the fourth World Cup in the rectangular format. Das extols its virtues of bringing together disparate communities. The circle format — the one with the booze and fighting in Huddersfield, based mainly in Punjab — has garnered headlines of a more sinister tenor for its association with gangs and violence.
At the 2011 World Cup (circle-style) in India, almost 40 players tested positive for steroids. Sandeep Singh Sandhu, a star player who lived in the West Midlands, was shot and killed at a tournament in India three years ago, said to be over rivalry between gangs and promoters. In England, a man was imprisoned in 2009 for attacking a security guard at a tournament with a 3½-foot samurai sword, and in August 2023 two groups used a tournament in Derbyshire for a fight involving guns and knives, after which seven men were jailed.
Das feared such headlines would tarnish his form of the sport, which still has geopolitical machinations. Visa difficulties kept Iran out of this World Cup, but there was hope that Pakistan would compete as the competition was not in India. Alas, the line-up of nations and fixtures has changed drastically in the past few days, as figures involved in the World Cup struck nervous tones.
Spiczko and Anna Kalbarczyk, a senior figure in the Polish delegation, last week delighted in the presence of Hungary, who weren’t listed in the official programme at the time. Sure enough, Hungary are now England’s opening opponents in the men’s competition. China, Pakistan, Egypt, Tanzania, Kenya, Malaysia, Cameroon and Sri Lanka were in the fixtures. No longer.
The golden road leads to what the Olympics could do (not only in terms of visas and so on). India is bidding to host the 2036 Games and has kabaddi among disciplines for inclusion. For now, despite the difficulties, organisers hail the World Cup as a great moment for the sport, for tourism in the West Midlands, and a global TV audience they place in the hundreds of millions. It would be some upset if India don’t win. It’s all over bar the chanting.
