Love For Cricket Essay

Passing by a street, whenever you hear “Indiaaa…indiiaaa”, the question arises “was it today? Was India’s ‘cricket match’ against a xyz country today? How did I forget! How did I miss it?”

Yes, that’s what happens with all of us! (Or most of us) We are Indians, after all! The very basic characteristic that you can associate with being an Indian is love for cricket.

When the world is so much into exploring different kinds of sports to literally nurture their athletic talents, India seems to be stuck within the boundaries of cricket only. It’s a very common factor that the Indian crowds are drastically mad about cricket matches. We all love our game, watching it, playing it and talking about it. Right from a chai-wala’s stall to school-colleges,

This is something which unites us all, binds us all.

Having said that, one would say “what’s wrong in this, this implies cricket is indeed a great sport.” Now, what’s wrong is, that cricket is getting all of this love, all of this attention, at the expense of other sports. The very idea, that “indiaa…indiiaa” means a “cricket match” and not any other sport is an example of our bias, of our complete negligence of other sports. Why should the cheering of our national team be limited to cricket only? There are so many sports in this world, and our country has representation in a whole bunch of them.

If one were to say, it’s because India is most successful in cricket, The Indian Men’s hockey team has 8 Olympic gold medals to its name. If one is to say, cricket has been the most successful sport in the past two decades, then consider the Indian cricket team’s performance against Indian Men’s Kabaddi team, which has won the Gold at all of the last 7 Asian games(1990-2014) and is a five time world champion(2010-2014). In fact, cricket is not even a global (or completely even Asian) sport. It is not an Olympic sport and it was only in the Asian games in Guangzhou, 2011, where cricket was introduced as a medal sport (India did not even have any representation

As an example, consider, the Indian contingent of 679 members (comprising of 516 athletes and 163 coaches and support staff) against the original list of 942 participants (including 662 athletes and 280 officials), sent by the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) to the 2011 Asian Games wherein The Sports Authority of India (SAI) said that it was in favor of strict application of the criteria that in individual events an athlete should be ranked in the top six, while it should be a top eight position in team sports. Why does such contraction of squad not apply to cricket teams as well? Why is there no such restriction on the tours the Indian cricket team