Author: Rahul Giri





 The century drought lasted 23 Tests and 41 innings, but even as the average and strike-rate plummeted, Virat Kohli’s commitment to excellence never did. Can he now gone on to enjoy the kind of Indian summer that Sachin Tendulkar and Jacques Kallis did?   The banks of the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad have been witness to some historic moments in Indian cricket. It was there that Sunil Gavaskar became the first man to scale the 10,000-Test-run mountain. It was also the venue where India became the first team to beat Australia in a World Cup knockout game since 1996,…



-Atreyo Mukhopadhyay Boring? Yes, because spectators these days prefer watching quick runs rather than a quiet contest between bat and ball. Monotonous? Perhaps, because the day’s play was mostly about India’s dogged batting against some restrictive lines bowled by the Australians. A spectacle? Not quite, because there were not many moments that sent the pulses of the spectators or TV audiences racing. Is that all? Not at all. It may not have a very exciting day of cricket from a viewer’s point of view, but the contest was engrossing in its own way. Neither side was ready to give an…

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…