India, Oct. 2 -- What sport demands the most all-round athleticism?

The body has a set of distinct capabilities-aerobic capacity, anaerobic conditioning, speed, strength, power, agility, mobility, and flexibility-and different sporting disciplines ask for varying degrees of mastery over each of these aspects.

Sports that run more on mental skills than physical ones, like chess, shooting, or archery, are exempt from this exercise, though the archer's wrists, forearms and certain smaller back muscles are nothing to scoff at.

An obvious contender is football, where the Indian national team engaged in a rare and strange happening-playing Brazil in an international friendly-last night.

Strange because India, who have never qualified for th...