Author: Rahul Giri

Why do we play elite sport? Money? Fame? Love for the sport? – Boria Majumdar These are questions that are often debated. When you lead a sport for a good decade and more in a country like India, the questions become even more relevant. When you see a domestic player get crores in the IPL, a WPL player get a quarter of a million dollars, do you then think why is it that someone like a Saurav Ghosal who has led Indian Squash for years don’t get anything close to it? Not even a 20th of it!! Does it play…









A bad beating before the World Cup is no bad thing, especially if it emphasises that you cannot afford to let standards slip. It also forces you to look again at the personnel at your disposal. With the leading players now playing three formats, in addition to tournaments like the Indian Premier League (IPL), the time between major competitions has to be carefully managed. When a player is just starting out or when they’re coming towards the end of their careers, team managements are acutely conscious of the workloads they take on. The time after a major event is…

At the end of the second ODI between Australia and India, Mitchell Marsh and Travis Head wore broad smiles as they walked back to the pavilion. After all, the duo had smashed the Indian attack to shreds, piloting the visitors to a 10-wicket win in a mere 11 overs. Meanwhile, the Indian players seemed dazed and dumbfounded. The kind of a day that the home side’s players would want to forget quickly and move forward. So what could be the reason behind India’s capitulation with the bat in hand? The first over of the game bowled by Mitchell Starc itself…





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,…