India’s semifinal loss in Sydney triggers outsized reaction, columnist says
India’s loss to Australia in the India-Australia semifinal in Sydney on Thursday — a defeat of the defending champions — provoked intense public and media outrage, yet life in the city and the country continued the following morning, the columnist observed.
The writer described the Friday dawn as ordinary despite the preceding hysteria, noting there had been no mass suicides, no Lehman Brothers-like trigger for economic collapse and no catastrophic epidemic; instead, the columnist recalled a hyperbolic charge that “eleven of our countrymen managed to dispossess themselves of a national treasure deemed more valuable than the Taj Mahal and the Kohinoor Diamond put together.” The piece contrasted those excesses with the calm of an ordinary morning and invoked a youthful sportsman’s remark to illustrate perspective: “I just lost a tennis match. Nobody died out there,” said Boris Becker after a shock defeat.
The column argued that perspective is determined by viewpoint and criticised a section of Indian fans and media for adopting a vantage point where only an Indian victory is acceptable. It warned against treating sport as if it were a matter of life and death, and described international cricket as a welcome diversion from more serious societal issues while acknowledging the sport’s inherent complexities.
The writer suggested that India’s seven successive wins earlier in the tournament had obscured the team’s weaknesses as much as they amplified its strengths. Individual comparisons followed: “As talented as he is undoubtedly, Shikhar Dhawan is no Virender Sehwag — a five-star game changer that every bowler in the world dreaded to come face to face with,” while “Virat Kohli is no Sachin Tendulkar,” and “Suresh Raina’s exploits pale in comparison with those of Yuvraj Singh.” Mohammed Shami was also contrasted with Zaheer Khan.
Acknowledging that those players “performed reasonably well in Australia and New Zealand,” the piece credited Mahendra Singh Dhoni with leadership, saying he “led with tremendous courage and tactical nous.” It added that, against Michael Clarke’s Australia — “ranked No.1 in the 50-overs game — and a team that has not lost a single game to India, across formats, in the last four months” — none of the Indian players, save the captain, matched the pedestal erected by their supporters.
The column held parts of the media responsible for inflating expectations and pandering to a “faux populism” that casts the Indian team as the repository of national hopes and feeds an appetite for players’ private lives. It singled out the attention given to Anushka Sharma during the match, asking, “Did Anushka Sharma deserve as much attention from the television cameras as she got on Thursday in Sydney?” and closed with a cultural warning that society risks becoming one that, as Soren Kierkegaard put it, “tranquilises itself in the trivial.”
The author concluded by urging a recalibration of how cricketers are perceived and by stressing the temporality of sporting success: “we must learn to de-divinise our cricketers and also come to terms with the temporality of sporting achievements.” The defeat occurred in the India-Australia semifinal in Sydney.