The mat stayed the same size while the players got much bigger

Professional kabaddi athletes are heavier and faster than the amateurs the court was designed for, and the collisions show it.

The playing area is a rectangle of fixed dimensions. It was fixed a long time ago, at a point when the people using it were village athletes and college players, well conditioned by the standards of the day and nothing like the professionals now standing on it.

Two decades of franchise money later, the men are bigger. Defenders carry more muscle, raiders carry more speed, and both groups have spent years in a gym that did not exist for their predecessors. The rectangle has not moved an inch.

Work out what that does. The same area now contains more mass moving faster, which means less space between bodies at the moment of contact and less room for either player to decelerate. Collision energy scales with mass and with the square of velocity, so a modest increase in both produces a substantially harder impact than the original design ever anticipated. Every one of those impacts lands on ankles, knees and shoulders.

The visible consequence is the injury list, which in this sport is long and repetitive. Ankle ligaments, knees caught under a falling body, shoulders taking the weight of a dive. Coaches respond with prehabilitation work and better strapping, and that helps at the margin. It does not change the geometry.

I think the mat should be wider. Not dramatically, a metre each side would do, enough to give a raider a genuine escape corridor and a defender the option of arriving at an angle rather than head on. It would make raiding easier, which purists will hate, and it would lengthen the chase, which broadcasters would probably enjoy.

The objection is that changing the field of play breaks continuity with every match ever recorded and with the village game the sport came from. That is not nothing. A court size is part of an identity.

But every sport that has professionalised has eventually had to admit that its rules were written for smaller people. Some widened the field, some changed the equipment, some added rest. Kabaddi has done none of it, and it is currently asking a twenty five year old to absorb four hundred collisions a season inside a space designed for someone twenty kilos lighter.