The Match Outside the Kabaddi Court That No One Was Watching

Just before dusk at a club ground in Rangpur, I heard a coach say something that has stayed with me. "Girls' kabaddi teams don't get a good court, so the players themselves clear the bricks and level the soil." He said it not as a complaint but as a habit — as if this were normal. In that single sentence lies the entire infrastructural truth of women's kabaddi in Bangladesh, and it does not show up in any points table.

Kabaddi is this country's national game. Men's leagues, television broadcasts, sponsorship deals and regular media coverage all exist, though thinly. For women's kabaddi the picture is almost inverted. District-level matches happen, players develop, some reach the national squad — but those matches have no spectator gallery, no commentator, and often no camera. I have watched this gap for years, and each time I see the same pattern: the game was already there, the coverage arrived much later.

One specific scene comes back. An inter-school kabaddi tournament at a girls' school ground in the district. Seven teams, a full day of matches. A few parents stood on one side, scarves on their heads, umbrellas in hand. No press tribune, no placards. I was recording a few raids on my phone, just for my own notes. The next day I shared a clip from one match and it reached a few coaches outside the district — some of them had not known that girl was such a good raider. The information was not missing; the system for collecting and publishing it was.

Deeper into the tactics, one thing becomes clear. Women's kabaddi develops raiding patterns differently from the men's game because squads have shorter preparation windows and fewer competitions. What players lose is match-spacing experience — when to raid, when to wait in defence, how to read the opposing captain's movement pattern. Male players build that instinct across a dozen competitive matches a year; girls often build it across three or four district tournaments where nearly every match is a knockout. That gap is not a talent gap; it is a programme gap.

From years of watching matches, I have learned that in kabaddi the quality of decisions matters more than the statistics. A team can score 40 points and still lose if its defensive line collapses in the last five minutes. That pattern recurs in women's matches because teams cannot build the habit of handling late pressure — pressure is created in matches, and the matches do not happen. The only way out of that loop is more competition, and more competition requires making the matches visible.

Here a contrarian question arises. The argument is that women's kabaddi attracts no sponsorship because there is no audience, and there is no audience because there is no broadcast. But looking at the parents standing on that district ground, the audience was there — it was simply never counted, never given a place to sit, never told when the match would start. Absent spectators are not a natural condition; they are an organising decision. A tournament that begins after school hours and receives no publicity will have an empty gallery — that is evidence of the organiser's inattention, not of the audience's indifference.

I once attended a district women's final where there was no gallery around the field. About forty people came as spectators, most of them players' families. Midway through the match a father asked me, "Will this be printed in the paper?" I said I would try. That question is the real one. He came to watch his daughter play, but what he wanted to know was whether it would be recognised — and that absence of recognition is what makes the path harder for the next generation.

I hold a conviction built from a decade of observation. The biggest problem in women's kabaddi is not court size or budget, but the absence of an organised information archive — no match records, no player profiles, no coverage archive. Each new generation therefore starts from zero. In men's kabaddi a young player has footage of predecessors to learn from. For women there is no such mirror. Building that mirror is not a luxury; it is part of training.

So I began recording district matches on a phone, even though the quality is not professional. But a clip that exists reaches a coach later, lets a player watch herself and correct mistakes, gives a journalist a source. What began with a borrowed phone and a tripod was really about attaching games that had been waiting for coverage to a timeline. The pitch was there all along; the camera simply had not arrived.

Now the question is who drives this change. The federation cannot do it alone, with limited resources. The media cannot do it alone, because match information never reaches them. Between the two there is an empty space where local observers, coaches, teachers and parents can work — the people who record results, remember names and preserve clips. That invisible infrastructure will be the real foundation of women's kabaddi in the years ahead.

As I left the ground, the lights had gone out. The girls were applauding each other, congratulating the winners among themselves. No camera, but the moment was real. The question is whether the next time this match is played, someone will come to watch — not just to watch, but to count, to write, and to remember.