Author: Rahul Giri





ISL FINAL today. One of the most difficult things in sport is to accept you were complacent. Very rarely does any athlete agree with such an outrageous proposition. And if you are Sunil Chhetri, India’s best football brand, such a thing is not just improbable, it is impossible. And yet it happened. When I asked him what explained the horror run between November and January and if he was complacenent, Chhetri agreed he was. He agreed that with all things going his way, he may have started to take things for granted. But sport being the biggest leveller of all,…

-Atreyo Mukhopadhyay ATK Mohun Bagan vs Bengaluru FC. Unlikely opponents in this season’s ISL final? Yes, perhaps. Unlikely contenders for India’s most prestigious football crown? No way. Two of the country’s most illustrious and dedicated football units are up against each other in the pinnacle match to be played in Fatorda, Goa, today. The format, without promotion or relegation, is an oft-heard criticism of this ambitious project called ISL which started in 2014. A version of the IPL in football, teams owned by film stars and celebrities from other walks of life, a tournament featuring franchises sans the traditional entities…

  He has been a lightning rod for criticism of the Indian team in recent times, and has lost his Test place, but KL Rahul showed in a low-scoring game just how important he could be to India’s hopes of winning the World Cup on home soil. It’s fair to say that KL Rahul has stayed in Indian cricket’s short-term plans because of his ODI form on Indian pitches. A lot of players suffered form slumps in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, unable to get to grips with bubble life, quarantine periods and isolation from friends and family.…





The focus may finally be back on the 50-over format, but the numbers suggest that the “middle child” is increasingly an afterthought for both India and modern-day cricket.   How desperate is India to win the World Cup on home soil later this year? This June, it will be a decade since MS Dhoni lifted the Champions Trophy at Edgbaston, the last ICC trophy that India won. You have to go back another two years for the last World Cup win. But whereas the buildup to that 2011 World Cup bordered on the obsessive, it’s hard to detect similar fervour…

-Bharath Ramaraj If we take a piece of paper and do some number-crunching on Mohammed Siraj’s bowling, one particular statistic glows brightly: His first PowerPlay numbers in ODI cricket since the start of 2022. In that period, Siraj has plucked as many as 25 wickets in the first 10 overs. To understand Siraj’s ever-rising stocks with the new ball in the 50-over format, let’s turn the pages back in time to January 15 this year. The temperature at Thiruvananthapuram had cooled down a bit after soaring to almost 40 degrees in the afternoon. But while zooming on the action in…