Author: Rahul Giri

The emergence of a village boy from a farming family is testament to the way cricket has grown in India, but Shubman Gill’s story also illustrates the importance of local heroes. A generation ago, when French football ruled the world, Adidas came up with an ad that featured a black-and-white picture of a run-down block of apartments. The tagline was “We all come from somewhere.” It was a picture taken in the Marseille neighbourhood where Zinedine Zidane grew up, and it illustrated the power of sporting dreams. For the longest time, however, where you grew up did matter in Indian…

-Boria Majumdar It is not easy being Smriti Mandhana at this point. She was the toast of India a month earlier and all of a sudden with four consecutive losses as skipper of RCB, she is being doubted and her leadership ability questioned. None of this is new. Sport, as Abhinav Bindra says, teaches you to lose. In sport you will always lose more than you will win. Sachin Tendulkar was the greatest to play the sport. He scored 50 hundreds in 200 Tests. Simply put he did not score a 100 in 150 Test matches. That’s sport. Real, not…



Even accounting for the fact that bowling has been easier than ever in Indian conditions this decade, Ashwin’s 6-91 in Ahmedabad showed why he’s right up there with the greatest spinners of all time. When it comes to the narratives about Indian pitches, you’ll find more cliches than the average teledrama. Words like ‘featherbed’, ‘dustbowl’ and ‘bunsen burner’ are par for the course, and the chronicles often have very little to do with reality. What the facts and figures tell you is that India, perhaps on account of its sheer size and variations in climate, has offered up the…



-Atreyo Mukhopadhyay A left-handed Australian opening batter leaps and pumps his fist in the air after reaching three figures. For years, this sight has been associated with David Warner, who made it his trademark celebration and performed it in different parts of the world. In Ahmedabad on a hot Thursday afternoon, it was the turn of Warner’s antithesis to execute the act at Narendra Modi Stadium. Different in every possible manner other than being a left-hander, Usman Khawaja thus ticked a box his opening partner in the first two Tests of the ongoing series has not. Despite scoring 25 Test…

By: Rahul Mukherji A friend and a very respected senior journalist G. Rajaraman introduced me to Rani Rampal, captain of the Indian (women’s) hockey team at the breakfast table during Trailblazers, a sports conclave organized by RevSportz in Kolkata last Sunday. After getting introduced to Rani I could not help thanking her for providing my ‘Wow Moments’ in sports during the India – Argentina semi-final in women’s field hockey competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The defining moment came when my whole family sat down in front of the television set to cheer for our women’s team. Apart from cricket or maybe FIFA World Cup,…