ChinmayC Blog

  At the beginning of this piece or rather any piece on the Indian Premier League-2026 that I’ve been intending to write for a long time and shelved again and again thanks to various reasons, I must address a concern of mine. It’s about the pitch at the iconic Wankhede stadium in Mumbai. My concern might be absolutely untrue or even preposterous, but address this I must. Have the curators tweaked the Wankhede pitch in some way like that in the suspected case of the Ahmedabad pitch in the ICC Men’s World Cup-2023 that eventually, as it is alleged, deprived an unbeaten India of the Cup? The pitch or the pitches on this ground have always been known to be sporting, giving opportunities to both the batsmen or the bowlers to excel and yielding exciting results with fighting totals. So, I was shocked when in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup semi-final earlier this year at the Wankhede when India set a mammoth target of 254 runs in 20 overs and England nearly chased it down. Since then, in ...

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...