The Good, Bad & Ugly ft. Vijender Singh, MS Dhoni and Manjapadda
From Vijender Singh signing a deal with Bob Arum, to Sunil Gavaskar throwing light at BCCI’s partiality towards star cricketers, to IAAF categorizing India as a high doping risk country and Afghan women’s sexual abuse claims coming true – we bring you the good, bad and ugly from this week.
The Good
India might not have a large fan base when it comes to boxing, leave alone professional boxing, but the recent developments is definitely a promising one. Vijender Singh’s latest signing of a 15-month deal with top promoter Bob Arum was surely exciting news for the pack of boxing followers that India have. Vijender also revealed that if everything goes as per the planning, then he could see himself facing the winner of the much anticipated bout between Canelo Alvarez and Rocky Fielding. For the uninitiated, Alvarez is a multiple-time world champion in two weight classes. 2008 Beijing Olympics bronze medallist, Vijender is also a WBO Asia Pacific and Oriental super middle weight champion and has remained unbeaten since going professional back in 2015. While the possibility of all this happening is actually thin despite Vijender promising his fans he would bring home a world title by 2019, these are exciting times and Vijender could be pioneering India into a sport they have hardly had any success.
It is a known fact that popular cricketers in India have almost a God status. But, it is all at the ground level and one primary duty for BCCI is to keep the cricketers out of the seeming bubble and remind them of their job every now and then. Unfortunately, some cricketers seem to enjoy immense power in the office as well and Sunil Gavaskar did well to point MS Dhoni and Shikhar Dhawan’s absence from the domestic circuit. While Dhoni had last played the long format before he had retired from it in 2014, Dhawan was also found having an off-season of sorts in Melbourne at the moment after he was dropped from the Test squad in Australia. So, after last playing in October, Dhoni would be playing in January next and Gavaskar pointed out that his lack of game time could well raise questions about his form ahead of the 2019 World Cup. However, before Dhoni would defend himself by stating that the long-format isn’t necessary for him anymore, Gavaskar stated that a player’s reflex slows with age and any form of cricket would serve as a good practice for the player – which sounds pretty logical.
The Bad
BCCI has been adamant on not playing pink ball or day-night Test matches for long now. Now, the India cricket board has a lot of reasons for their refusal. Playing under the lights would bring in the dew factor, which would be a huge disadvantage of the spinners – India’s biggest weapon in the longest format. The pink ball is also designed in a way that doesn’t allow the shine to lose fast, compared to the red ball, which massively delays a team’s ability to reverse swing.
One week after five Indian athletes - Nirmala Sheoran, Sanjivini Jadhav, Jhuma Khatun, Sandeep Kumari, Naveen Chikara - were tested positive after the dope test, reports have emerged that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has decided to place India in high doping risk category as per its new categorization. As per Hindustan Times, the IAAF has classified all countries into three categories based on their athletes’ proclivity towards doping and success rate. The Group A would have nations with high doping risk and high success rate while the third group (Group C) having low doping risk and success rate. India
The Ugly
In many ways, the Indian Super League, which had started five years back, is coming to fruition now. After the glamour and glitz initially brought in the
Things have changed rapidly fast for the Afghanistan women football. Four years back, the country was applauded for starting its first
Comments
Sign up or log in to your account to leave comments and reactions
0 Comments