ChinmayC Blog

Well, it’s about the announcement of the Groups and the full schedule made on October 1, 2026, of the 14-Team ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup-2027 to be hosted by South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia from October 2 to November 21 next year across 12 venues. However, somewhat swayed by the never-ending hype surrounding the arch-rivals India and Pakistan , the ICC mandarins being no exception to this rule, we too are focusing on the match between them as to its when and where, in healthy disregard of the never-ending geopolitical rivalry between the two that interferes with the game in no healthy way—like embargoing the innocent handshakes or robbing one of its deserving trophies. Yes! Cricket belies everything—the game does inevitably unfold on the field whatever be the hassles over it, and the fans love it even as all other stakeholders bring in the dough! So, the most sought-after mouth-watering group-stage match between India and Pakistan is scheduled on October 10, 2027 in Johannesburg a...

Rohit Sharma has been emerging as a paradox of Indian cricket, as much for the uncertainty about his place in the playing eleven as for his sort of a plunge into the television show business . This paradox is not less significant than the celebrated googly . The rollercoaster ads on his debut appearance as a host in Sony Entertainment Television ’s new show Family Full House With Rohit Sharma put this innocent writer in grievous doubt about his future in the ODI cricket only which he’s been playing after retiring from Test and T20 cricket. Has the national selector Ajit Agarkar finally decided to shelve the superlative cricketer from Team India, so as to exclude him from the Indian squad being prepared for the World Cup-2027 ? However, the selector’s final decision to include him in the upcoming ODI Series against the visiting West Indies has indeed assured this writer as far as his place in Team India is concerned, but put him in great confusion as his host-show was launched on 19 t...

New Zealand , among other teams visiting India , made the Indian spinners look useless once again on their own home turf . The coach keeps on wearing that ominously ' gambhir ' countenance, but is hardly 'gambhir' about such core issues. Such is his obsession with all-rounders ! Anyway, congratulations to the young NZ team for registering their first ever ODI Series win in India, after the previous consecutive 7 Series losses, and following it up with their first ever Test Series win on Indian soil about a year back! The way Daryl Mitchell played is inspirational for all cricketers; he kept consistently on building partnerships with Will Young one time and with Glenn Philips  the next. Bravo!  Alas! Gone are the good old days when Virat Kohli hit a ton Team India used to win the match hands down! Alas! Team India superstar flamboyant batsmen or most of them continue, however, to fail in crunch matches when a win means a Series point!  High time Head Coach Gauta...

Rohit Sharma is among the most aggressive yet elegant, correct and stylish, not to be called pinch hitters, openers of Indian Cricket , starting with Farokh Engineer (mostly in Test Cricket those days except for the World Cup-1975), on to Krishnamachari Srikkanth ,  Sachin Tendulkar , Sourav Ganguly , Ajay Jadeja , Virender Sehwag , Gautam Gambhir and concluding with Yashasvi Jaiswal . They’ve always been a delight to watch and the early fall of their wickets cast a doom for cricket fans invariably, often for the team too. Rohit Sharma has excelled in the limited overs format (making his debut in T20I and in ODI in 2007) with quite a few world records for most runs in T20I, most sixes in international cricket, most double hundreds (3) in ODIs ( One Day Internationals ), most centuries (7) in Cricket World Cups , most centuries (5) in a single World Cup for which he won the ICC Men’s ODI Cricketer of the Year in 2019 and the individual record of the highest 264 runs in ODI cri...

We're talking about cricket here, from the point of view of Indian cricket; but mixing it with politics isn't something that was never heard of! We published here kind of a rant post during the disastrous down under India tour which was so, not primarily because of the run-less performances of the stalwarts, but also because of the politics of selection and clout. The heavyweights naturally cannot be disposed of easily which is why they figure in the Team for Champions Trophy-2025 too.  Leaders and politicians spend a helluva lot of time announcing the CM or PM faces as the case may be. Similarly, the cricket mandarins and selectors have managed to announce the squad only after more than ten days of serial huddles. This is typically political! Isn't this?  Now, Congress--the oldest national political party of the country--is in the throes of deadly atrophy! So much so that quite a few parties of the Alliance which was formed recently, have threatened to abandon Congress whi...

Announcing the confirmed complete schedule of the forthcoming ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup-2024, the International Cricket Council has expressed its happiness at the expansion of the tournament with never-before 20 cricket nations participating and the United States of America coming in as a co-host, the first time ever for a manor ICC event. Referring to America as the biggest sports market the ICC said that this would provide a huge stimulus to world cricket in the coming years. The 9 th version of T20 World Cup is set to kick off on June 1 st in New York and conclude with the Final to be played in Barbados on 29 th of the same month, the West Indies being the other co-host. The tournament, divided into four groups of five teams each, will have 55 matches in all out of which 16 league matches are to be played in the USA, and 8 out of 16 to be staged at the 34,000-capacity new modular cricket stadium coming up at the Nassau County, Long Island, New York, including the blockbuste...

The World Cup-2023 Final still remains a nightmare, a bad dream that refuses to go, in the minds of most of Indian cricket lovers: their home team on home grounds crashing to a humiliating and a listless defeat in the grand finale after winning all the ten games leading to it. Well, for most of the sober cricket lovers win or defeat is always a part of any game and it’s never an issue to be distressingly sour or angry about; but the problem was that their home team couldn’t offer a creditable fight against Australia that they defeated in the very first game of the event and also in the previous matches in a bilateral series and had gone down like a pack of schoolboys as if trying to understand or find what’s the game of cricket all about. And that rankled, and still does. Expectedly, the fans or the organizers started crying hoarse about the pitch being doctored unnecessarily or mistakenly even though it belonged to their own country and to the supposedly biggest stadium of the country...

The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup-2023 unfolding in India is not even halfway through as of today, and it’s impossible to say which of the contesting 10 teams are going to make it to the Top 4 in the knockout stage. And there’ve been huge upsets too in terms of the short-format World Champions England losing to Afghanistan and the ebullient South Africa, after they scored in excess of 400 runs against Sri Lanka, falling again to Netherlands. As we write this Pakistan and Australia fighting it out in a very important match for both of them: Pakistan, after making a rollicking start in the tournament, fell apart against India while Australia registered their first win against Afghanistan after three consecutive losses. Therefore, at the current juncture, we can hardly predict which teams are going to stage a fight-back or which teams are going to the top seamlessly, except perhaps for two teams: India and New Zealand. Both of them have won four out of four matches each so far—every win bei...

It has to be termed as a good positive sign in view of the ICC World Cup T20 coming up later this year and the ODI ICC World Cup coming next year that Team India, of late, has been winning in the shorter formats consistently. After Team India-Bumrah franchise lost the leftover 5 th Test against England the various franchises have been blooming in the following matches in the shorter formats. Before the 5 th Test Team India-Pandya franchise had triumphed over Ireland quite easily; then Team India-Rohit franchise won both the T20I Series and the ODI Series against England with the same margin of 2-1; next, Team India-Dhawan franchise swept the 3-match ODI Series against the competitive and spirited West Indies on the latter’s turf 3-0; and at the moment Team India-Rohit franchise has taken a lead of 1-0 in the 3-match T20I Series against the West Indies routing the hosts in the first T20I match. Before this winning spree Team India-Pant franchise managed to draw the ODI Series against ...

The movie aptly titled ‘83’ is really worth reliving Team India’s glorious World Cup victory at Lord’s in 1983 defeating the mighty West Indies , thus stopping the latter’s hat-trick moments after victories in 1975 and 1979 ; and in fact, the West Indies team is yet to win their third World Cup since then. I missed watching the movie on the big screen as moviegoing has been effectively stopped since the last two years, particularly for the elderly people like me. I grabbed the opportunity as soon as the great cricket movie was premiered on television yesterday. The movie too has suffered due to the pandemic: first it was slated for release in 2019 which, unfortunately, was postponed due to post-production reasons and after that the COVID-19 recurring bans and restrictions never allowed to make the movie reach millions of cricket fans. Finally, though it could be released in December 2021 its shows were again affected by the Omicron wave. Therefore, as it were, the movie could not re...