-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 reel. No retakes.
In sport you always fail in public. In front of millions. Just like Sachin did in 2007 when he was bowled in the match against Sri Lanka for a duck. He wanted to retire. Give it all up. Thankfully he did not. Sir Viv’s call made a difference. He came back, with his support system around him backing him up, and won the world cup in 2011. And yes, in public, in front of millions watching.
That’s why sport is unique. The only thing that allows you to fail in public and then come back and win in public. Smriti will as well. She is a great champion of this generation and she too will come back a better player and better leader. That’s what will define her. The comeback. To win it for the RCB fans. Her own fans. And this is when the fans need to stand by her and the team. Take the Chicago Cubs. 1908-2016 Wrigley Field. No trophy and yet the fandom kept growing. That’s what defines a fan. Win or lose a Smriti fan at the age of 8 will die a Smriti fan at the age of 80. The only constant in life. All else, if you think, changes. Food habits, dress, political understanding, relationships, but fandom in sport stays constant.
For Smriti, there are examples before her.
The KKR campaign in 2021 has many life lessons to it. First, it was a lesson in how its never say never in life. Just like the second covid wave, KKR’s campaign was all doom and gloom in April and May 2021. But come September they were a different team with a very different mindset. Things do get better after all. For Smriti too it will. For KKR it was about self belief and how it rubs off on the people surrounding you. The introduction of Venky Iyer at the top made Shubman Gill and Rahul Tripathi very different players with far less pressure on them. Finally, even without Russell, KKR never lacked the self belief associated with champion teams. It was the perfect life lesson. Despite all the negativity around, they did not give up.
The journey is never over. Smriti will know that things change and change is the only constant always. For a true devotee of sport, it has to happen. And will.