Jubilee Post News & Views
Overconfidence!
Was this an overconfidence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India or skipper Virat Kohli or coach Ravi Shastri as they didn’t thinks necessary a good preparation, including practice match on English soil before taking on New Zealand in the World Test Championship (WTC) final?
India’s pathetic showing on the pitch of Southampton, where they lost to Ken Williamson and Co by eight-wicket says it all. For sure, the loss exposed chinks in India’s batting as well as bowling too. First the Kiwis made the red cherry talk by keeping Indian batsmen in check throughout the match and then batsmen, especially captain Williamson and Rose Taylor made mockery of them.
If India had played some warm-up games (which one feels BCCI could have managed with its clout in the world cricket), things would have been different, and this happened when India’s one of the most successful captain ever in the Indian cricket history Sourav Ganguly is at the helm of affairs.
So can we say that BCCI didn’t use its clout by arranging some practice games for India or the people concerned were overconfident? The simple excuse of loss came after the loss when skipper Kohli said they wanted to play matches against counties between the WTC final and England Test series. However, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) didn’t allow that.
Interestingly, in the absence of matches against county sides, India were expected to play India A. But the India A tour was cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.
Undoubtedly, the loss at the WTC final has once again denied Kohli to put his hand on his maiden ICC Trophy, but “no serious planning” ahead of a big mission should be a big lesson for Team India as well as the BCCI, and if the things like this continue, Kohli and Co would face more humiliation on English soil as they still have to play a full series there.
Power tussle!
Ever since the ‘Big bosses” of the Indian Olympic Association are flexing muscles for the supremacy of power, the Indian sport has been suffering a lot at least for the last two years. One of the bosses went on chasing two others in the IOA with a well-hatched conspiracy against them, issuing so many show cause notices to them, brining the internal issues to the fore and tarnishing the image of the country’s biggest sport body.
The One Vs Two struggle continued and even in the recent past and it impacted heavily on the sponsorship of apparels of the Indian contingent at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, starting in July. Group One conspired and forced Chinese company Li Ning to lose its contract and this compelled the Group Two to search for other sponsorship.
In fact, the Group One didn’t expect such a quick move by the Group Two, which brought MPL on board with a much bigger sponsorship. But the Group One managed to convince the people in the government not to write the name of the new sponsor on the jerseys of the sportspersons.
The real impact of the ongoing power tussle would be seen when the country’s biggest sporting body sit for a fresh election in December, and if all goes well, the Group Two with the support of a political heavyweight would be able to kick the Group One out. But this won’t be the end as then Group Two would start scratching the back of Group One “boss” who heads an international sporting body.
Sporting politicians!
The general saying that politics shouldn’t be mixed in sport isn’t true in Uttar Pradesh as here some sportspersons too feel that politics is must in sports for their own growth. Take the example of a few ad hoc coaches on the rolls of the Uttar Pradesh Government, who tried to make use of the politics by launching a series of personal attacks on UP sports boss and made all 350 ad hoc coaches pay for this.
In reality, barring 40-50 ad hoc coaches, most of them avail a handsome remuneration without doing anything. In fact, they have turned the stadiums and sporting facilities of the state government as their “teehas” at the cost of sports and the sportspersons and misusing the powers.
However, the wrong deeds of these “netas” of sports forced the government to introduce outsourcing even in the appointment of the ad hoc coaches, and even now they are trying to misguide the needy ones.
Also Read : Over 1 million deaths was avoidable
Also Read : Breathless India and Clueless WE
