Author: Rahul Giri

There have been some teething troubles, expected for a tournament put together at the last minute, but the enthusiastic response from fans vindicates the BCCI’s decision to give women cricketers the platform they deserve. Would Smriti Mandhana, Richa Ghosh and Renuka Singh Thakur, cornerstones of India’s T20 side, have had better Women’s Premier League (WPL) seasons had they enjoyed the backing of a partisan Bangalore crowd? Would Deepti Sharma and Devika Vaidya have been able to up their game in front of a Lucknow audience rooting for the UP Warriorz? These are some of the questions relating to on-field…







A generation ago, in Chennai on March 22, Sourav Ganguly’s Indian team registered one of cricket’s greatest wins. The modern-day team observed the anniversary with a shoddy, series-losing performance against Australia. For Indian cricket fans of a certain age, the combination of March 22 and Chennai is a magical one. In fact, you could argue that it’s right up there with memories of any of India’s three World Cup wins. It was in the city on the Coromandel coast 22 years ago that Sourav Ganguly’s team, a year of from the trauma of the match-fixing scandal and less than…





Boria Majumdar With a lot of talk around the forthcoming Major League Cricket in the US and the recently concluded draft, it is pertinent to look back at the origins of the sport in America and also ask the question why cricket lost out to a sport like Baseball? Why Baseball and not cricket in the US? The earliest record of cricket in the Americas was found in the ‘secret diary’ of William Byrd II of Virginia and the date, believe it or not, is 25 April 1709. Subsequent references to cricket date back to Georgia in 1737 and an…