Author: Boria Majumdar

In a freewheeling chat with RevSportz, Shashwat Goenka opens up on Mohun Bagan doing well in the current football season. They will play the ISL final on Saturday in Kolkata. At the same time, Lucknow Super Giants have also been brilliant in IPL 2024. Shashwat speaks of giving the coaches enormous freedom, in both the sports. Joining Shashwat in the interview is Marcus Stoinis, a massive superstar. He talks of the changes in T20 cricket in IPL 2024, and quickly adds the ICC T20 World Cup may be different. Boria: Look at Lucknow Super Giants. Six wins and two more,…

The Cricketer had alleged I had been intimidating him for years. See clinching evidence below, and make up your mind. In 2018, the Cricketer had sat out more games than he had played that year. A far more important news story was the assertion that his rehab at the NCA had not been as it should. There were many reports saying so, and anyone who covered Indian cricket at the time would testify that this was the perception that had gained ground. A couple of weeks before such reports was published, I had reached out to The Cricketer, offering support…

We continue to look up to the West on many counts. We continue to admire their universities, their libraries and sense of history, architecture, beautified parks, and most of all the opulence. We have fashioned our shopping malls, which have become synonymous with development in most Indian cities, on the Western model and follow Hollywood religiously. The Oscars and the BAFTA are more credible than our own film awards and Lord’s is still cricket’s mecca despite having a refurbished Eden Gardens at hand. Yes, we have the Indian Premier League (IPL) but most commentators are still foreigners and almost all…

As a sports analyst, I look for a fight in a team. Though India lost the tie 1-4 against Indonesia in the Thomas Cup on Wednesday, there was plenty of fight on display which augurs well for Indian badminton, going forward. In fact, in the match against China today afternoon, I am yet again going to look for fight. The draw, which will be announced at 11.15am, will be an interesting one. While India’s title defence is on the line, the truth is this is the best we have seen the Indians play in a while. Let’s go step by…

‘You fetch social-media likes.’ It was October 2022, and I was on my way to Australia for the T20 World Cup. I was checking in at Kolkata Airport when I got a call from Subhayan Chakraborty, one of my colleagues. He asked if I was amenable to two young and aspiring social-media influencers working with him on a show. I had always wanted to promote new talent on the RevSportz platform. But when he mentioned their names to me, a switch was flicked in my head. These two gentlemen, whom I have subsequently come to know reasonably well, had both…

Twenty-six months. More than 800 days, to be exact. I hadn’t stepped inside a cricket ground in India. Rather, I wasn’t allowed to. All because of a series of untruths paraded by a cricketer and the subsequent social-media vitriol that followed. Yes, I have served my ban. Complied with every condition imposed on me. And yes, I am now entitled to go back. To the Eden Gardens, or any other stadium in the country. As we parked the car opposite the Club House and stepped out, it all started to come back. The same chatter, the same intensity and the…

During the two years of my ban, the event that I was most apprehensive about was the World Cup on home soil in October 2023. It was the biggest cricket event in India in years, and to not be able to do my work in the manner that I was used to was going to hurt a lot. It wasn’t a level playing field with the sanction still in place and I was starting out with a serious handicap. When I compared the Cricket World Cup to the Asian Games, for instance, I knew as a team we would do…

I may have been away from cricket, but there were occasions in the two years when I realised that, even in cricket, not all was lost. My rather surprising meeting with Ravi Ashwin was one such occasion. On my flight back after the deferred England-India Test match at Edgbaston in July 2022, I was pleasantly surprised to find Ravi Ashwin, one of my favourite players and someone I know really well, in the seat immediately in front of me. It had been Mayank Agarwal on the way to Birmingham. Now, it was Ashwin. The cricket Gods, it seemed, were intent…

I left for Oxford on May 15, 2022. With the abuse continuing unabated, it was perhaps the best thing to do to retain sanity. Just two days earlier, on May 13, Pullela Gopichand, one of my closest friends, visited Kolkata for a function. He was staying at the ITC Royal Bengal and messaged me saying that he was coming to the city. Gopi and I go back to 2003-04, and have been extremely close friends ever since. While I wasn’t really in the mood to meet anyone, I responded instinctively to Gopi’s message, and asked him if he would like…

In one of the book signings today, a gentleman asked me where the maximum abuse came from. It was a pretty straightforward answer. And the truth is, it came from The Cricketer’s official fan page and was engineered by the principal administrator of that platform. We were shocked to see that he was allowed to go ahead without any checks, whipping up a frenzy day in and day out – directed at my wife and family, who had absolutely no role in the entire issue. The fan page was actually used as a troll army by those in power and…