Is Rohit Sharma’s form a matter of concern going into the pink-ball Test? The answer is an emphatic ‘yes’. He missed an opportunity to bat for long in Canberra, and could easily have left the ball outside the off stump. It was a shot played on instinct, and that’s where Rohit needs to go back to his 2021 self. Show patience and restraint. But that’s not the point of this piece.
The point is how social media has reacted to the failure. And to Rohit reuniting with the team. For a section, it was as if the failure was welcome. Rohit not scoring is somehow a matter of great satisfaction. It inevitably brings out a comparison with Virat Kohli, more now that he got the hundred in Perth. Rohit is then trolled or abused. This is a very strange aspect of Indian fandom, one that is becoming increasingly polarised and ugly.
Both Rohit and Kohli are key to India’s chances in this series – Rohit as skipper and batter, and Kohli as senior batter and a key member of the leadership group. If India are to win, both need to contribute. But why just them? India will need contributions from KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant to create history in Australia. That’s where this immature fandom kind of sticks out.
Why would you want your captain to fail? And why would “Rohitians” not want Kohli to succeed? Far more than India and a possible Indian win Down Under, these fan wars have started to dominate the cricket space on social media. Deranged people with little or no understanding of sport have been empowered by technology, and now have access to abuse freely.
The question that I often ask myself is why it came to this. When did the team become secondary, and fan wars the primary subject of interest? Why is such a thing encouraged on social media, and is there any remedy going forward? For anything praising Kohli, there is a negative comment from a Rohit fan and vice versa. While neither player is remotely connected to this nonsense, this is a whole new universe that we have been exposed to as far as cricket fandom in India is concerned.
And it is not just restricted to Rohit and Kohli. There are smaller fan wars between Pant and Sanju Samson fans, Rahul and someone else and so on. While a whole lot of Samson fans believe Pant is overrated in white-ball cricket, Pant’s fans speak about the inconsistency of Samson and heap abuse on him.
“This is how social media is and operates,” said an academic who studies social media trends. “Unless there are fights and abuse and criticism, the space will turn sane. You don’t want it to be sane. You want it buzzing and these fan groups contribute to making it as such.”
While these fans can do and say what they want, the truth is that India will need both Rohit and Kohli in Adelaide. And the others. It is a defining Test match and a win could get India really close to making history. That’s what we want and need to see, and that’s what the team management will be focussed on. Fans wars can continue in their parallel universe.
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