YET another season of the Ranji Trophy has just commenced, and in these times of cricket’s financial muscle, it is unsurprising to note that that the winner of this domestic championship will carry home a cool Rs 20 million.
It is with some regret and nostalgia that I recall the times when I played the Ranji Trophy back in 1994, got paid three thousand rupees per match…
NOTHING captures the imagination of the media or a sports fan more than the story of an underdog overcoming the overwhelming odds and the fearsome competition to emerge an unlikely victor, or at least a success story. The most recent example of course is the Trinidad and Tobago team during the Champions League, where Pollard and the Gangas became household names as they…
EVEN when Brett Lee was going great guns in the final of the Champions League at Hyderabad, a cursory glance at the upcoming India-Australia one-day itinerary told you that Lee would struggle to make the starting XI at Vadodara, because the time between the CLT20 final at Hyderabad and the first one-dayer at Vadodara was too short.
Expectedly, Lee got to Vadodara from…
IT'S BEEN a busy week in the Indian sports world. A billion dollar event, and a BCCI deal for much less. To start on a positive note, the Airtel Champions League final provided a suitable backdrop for 2 days of overdue meetings on broadcast piracy in cricket.
No surprise that the two main areas of discussion centred on the cricket footage spilling out illegally on…
THE DAY BCCI decided to sack Robin Singh and Venkatesh Prasad, a friend of mine, who is the sports editor of a Mumbai daily, called up Gary Kirsten for his reaction. Kirsten, who was in Cape Town at that time, not only feigned ignorance but also registered surprise at the sacking..
When I told the same friend that it was actually Kirsten’s unfavourable report that did…
THE UGLY fracas witnessed on telly between Commonwealth Games Organising Committee secretary general Lalit Bhanot telling a wired CEO Mike Hopper to leave the premises was a shocker. The bust up saw Bhanot asking Hooper not to give interviews to media in the CWG HQ.
Instead he could speak to them at his residence. Which, Suresh Kalmadi a couple of days earlier had…
IT WASN'T a surprise really when India made its inglorious exit from the Champions Trophy (to me at least). But it made quite an impact on quite a few people. The proprietor of a prominent Mumbai afternoon paper, who goes on almost every cricket tour, suggested in his article, after Pakistan had lost to Australia, that the match had been fixed. That Pakistan had not tried hard…
IT's BECOME fashionable for the IPL franchises to compare themselves to the English Premier League football clubs as a business model. Given that I was at the Premier League's Chelsea against Liverpool game Sunday, I thought it might be interesting for Indian sports fans to compare their sporting experience against matchday at Chelsea.
Arriving before the game,…
AT A TIME when the sheen is rapidly coming off the bejeweled security blanket that protects the Indian cricket team, the opportunity to leverage a development that is mind-boggling yet timely for emerging sports in India may just have found a customer-base.
With Vijender Singh being ranked number one middleweight boxer in the world by the International…
SUDDENLY we have Gary Kirsten disowning everything and acting coy. Suddenly we have Gary Kirsten playing innocent like nobody’s business. But the point is, does Gary have anything to feel guilty about in the first place?
Gary is getting support from every quarter he can muster. South African coach Mickey Arthur has written in his column in the same paper in which the…