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 ...
In the increasingly tense geopolitical situation in the Indian subcontinent , I think it’s time to take some bold Cricket decisions by the BCCI in active consultation with the ICC and the Government of India , and not dillydallying with the issues involved nor allowing the overwhelming commercial angle win every time which in turn leads to absurd hypocritical scenarios as we’d recently witnessed in the games between India and Pakistan in the Asia Cup-2025 the winner's Trophy of which is still eluding India. In the upcoming ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2026 we’re set to behold more games in and off the field with Bangladesh being literally taken over by the radicals and the violent upheaval there leading to atrocities on the minorities, mostly Indian Hindus . What followed in the most popular game of cricket in India is obvious: the outrage in the social media crying hoarse over retaining Mustafizur Rahman in Shahrukh Khan’s KKR franchise for the IPL-2026 thus pressuring ...