The Empty Column: Where Kabaddi Keeps No Record, Folklore Moves In

Balewadi, Pune. August 2026. Puneri Paltan had beaten Bengaluru Bulls 34-31, and it was forty minutes past the final whistle. Outside the gate, three boys were arguing about Deepak Hooda's 11 raid points and Girish Ernak's 4 tackle points. I wrote down 23 questions from them. One has followed me ever since: how many defenders were left in front of Hooda on his third raid?

In the mixed zone I put that question to Hooda. He answered the one about the table and let the third-raid question pass. But the real problem that evening was not Hooda's answer. The real problem was that in a fourteen-person press box, not one person could say how many defenders had been on the mat for that third raid.

The number existed. It lived on the mat for thirty seconds and then it died. Nobody wrote it down.

Context: One Sport, Two Memories

Kabaddi's record problem is structural, not technical. Three terms need fixing first, because this piece is also for the reader looking at a scoresheet for the first time. A raid is the thirty-second phase in which an attacker crosses into the opposition half and scores by touching a defender or crossing the bonus line; a tackle is the moment a defender stops him. Ten or more raid points in a match is a Super 10, five or more tackle points is a High 5. Losing the entire team is an all out, often written as lona. Without these definitions, everything below becomes a list of numbers instead of an argument.

Now hold two memories side by side. The first belongs to the Pro Kabaddi League. Twelve franchises, one television contract, and therefore every raid tagged, every tackle logged, every auction price published. In Season 5 at Balewadi, the scoresheet in front of me carried a raid-by-raid breakdown. That data existed because a camera was present and the camera's contract was explicit: graphics were needed, and graphics need numbers.

The second memory is everything outside the camera. Senior nationals, junior nationals, the women's domestic circuit, village tournaments, and those international fixtures to which nobody sends a photographer. Here the scoreline survives — sometimes in two columns of a Haryana or Punjab regional daily, sometimes in a federation circular — but the raid-by-raid record does not. And the circulars tend to vanish from the website as quietly as they appeared on it.

The result is that kabaddi has two memories rather than one. A bright, searchable memory belonging to twelve franchises. And a dim, oral memory belonging to the rest of the sport. When someone says we don't know this game's history, they are entirely right. The history was never written. It was only remembered.

Core: What Moves Into the Empty Column

The camera decides what gets remembered

31 August 2026, Jakarta. Asian Games semi-final. India lost 18-27 to Iran, having already lost 23-24 to South Korea in the group. That evening the women's team lost the final 27-24 to Iran. Sixty Indian fans stood outside GBK, and none of them said Iran had invented something new. All of them said India had done nothing.

In the mixed zone, Fazel Atrachali told me Iran had planned for the pattern of India's third raid. That was one sentence, and it was the most concrete piece of technical information from the entire tournament. There was no public way to verify it. Where India's third raids went, which defender they turned toward, how often they drifted to the bonus line — answering any of that required a raid log, and no raid log was published.

So the explanation of the defeat became moral rather than tactical. The team didn't turn up. The players were distracted by weddings. The coach picked the wrong squad. All of this may be partly true, but none of it can be checked, and what cannot be checked slowly becomes folklore. After Jakarta I began adding a section to every preview — how India loses. Writing that section required Iran's data, and every time I hit the same wall.

A cut player has no public record

It is easy to say a cricketer had a poor season, because a Ranji average is one search away. Selection arguments in kabaddi are fought without that convenience. How many tackles a defender completed at the senior nationals, what a raider's strike rate was — none of it sits in any public document. When a player is dropped, he has no number to hold up in his own defence. There is only the selector's memory, and the selector's memory can change next year.

I have spoken to several dropped players over the years. Almost every time I heard the same sentence — sir said the form wasn't there. Not once did anyone reply, sir, in what form do you hold it. The basis of the argument simply does not exist. This is not only an injustice to the player. It is a credibility problem for the sport. Where a decision cannot be challenged, trust in the decision-maker becomes the only available option.

The livelihood ledger sits in no register

When Season 8 was postponed indefinitely in 2026, I tracked fourteen Puneri Paltan players across eighty-seven days. Nine had returned to family farms in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Only three had gym access. There were forty-seven phone interviews and one ninety-minute video call with Girish Ernak, skipping rope on a terrace because there was no room indoors.

None of that data belonged to any federation or government document. I assembled it, some fans assembled it, some former teammates assembled it. Kabaddi's institutional memory today rests with volunteers. That sounds comforting and is in fact fragile — a volunteer's spreadsheet can end up on someone else's laptop next year, and then on nobody's.

There is a second face to the same emptiness. Since 2026, crore-rupee auctions, retention lists and salary caps are printed openly. In the same sport, thousands of players have no public income record at all — no railway job, no state police recruitment, no contract. When a medal is celebrated, my first question is always who got paid for it and who did not. Asking that question requires a register, and the register does not exist.

Effort metrics and the difference between effort and evidence

Distance covered and high-intensity sprints are now treated as proof of work. Pointless running also produces very pretty numbers. In kabaddi the direct equivalent is raid count. A raider who makes twenty raids for six points will look magnificent on a graphic; a raider who makes nine raids for seven points wins the match. A Super 10 tells you nothing if it does not tell you when those points came — in the third phase with the team under pressure, or in the last minute with the result settled. A number without that context is not analysis. It is decoration.

This is why the shortage of kabaddi data bothers me less than its shallowness. The numbers that exist are usually severed from context. We count raid points but not the defenders in front of them. We count tackles but not whether it was a super tackle or an ordinary one. Such numbers do not end arguments. They send arguments in the wrong direction.

The deepest hole is the women's game

Where men's kabaddi at least has a camera, women's kabaddi often has only a scoreboard. India lost the 2026 women's final 27-24 to Iran, and that result is still remembered as an upset rather than as evidence of Iran's defensive structure. Had a raid-by-raid log been public, it might have shown how Iran pushed India's raiders toward the left corner in the second half. The log does not exist. So four years later the argument is exactly where it was.

I add a line about the women's game and non-league domestic kabaddi to every league report, because twelve franchises are not a sport. That line is necessary precisely because the empty column is widest where the camera goes least.

Contrarian: More Numbers Will Not Fix This

The industry's assumption is that kabaddi needs more data — dashboards, analytics, graphics. I think the diagnosis is wrong. Kabaddi does not need more numbers. It needs numbers that can be checked, with a source, a date and a person accountable for them. A number nobody can trace is more dangerous than no number at all, because it looks like evidence.

The second contrarian point concerns the press box. We cover what the camera covers, and then we call it the sport. If the season has twelve teams and our stories never leave those twelve, we are ourselves filling the empty column we complain about. In my own box, fourteen of seventeen people were men, and I have to admit that all of us together still failed to record a single raid that evening.

The third concerns referees and review. The third-umpire referral for a toe-touch is now routine in kabaddi. The review system was introduced to reduce controversy, and in practice it has moved controversy off the mat and into the review room and the grey zones of the rulebook. The argument is no longer whether the tackle was made; it is when the referral window closed and which frame of footwork is deemed decisive. The public record of those frames is, once again, the thing we do not have.

Looking Ahead

The press box had a rhythm before I ever had a byline. That rhythm was built by sitting forty minutes past the whistle, by forty-seven phone calls, and by those twenty-three questions, one of which still has no answer.

The next time a selection committee drops a player, the real question will not be whether a dashboard exists. It will be whether the dropped player can put a finger on a number and say, look here. On the day that number exists, every kabaddi story will have to be rewritten — rituals do not glitter, they ring, and that evening the ringing will stop.

Start with one sentence from Jakarta: Iran planned for the third raid. To verify it we need a log, with a date and with names. Whatever argument follows will at least not be a false one.