All posts by h716a5.icu

They haven’t yet fired as a combination, and with the USA leg over and conditions getting better for batting, India may need more from them

Sidharth Monga21-Jun-20241:21

Kumble: India unlikely to change Kohli-Rohit partnership against Bangladesh

At this T20 World Cup 2024, India have made it clear they want to be flexible with their batting order – with one caveat.”Besides the openers, none of the guys’ positions are fixed as such,” Rohit Sharma said ahead of their game against Pakistan in New York. “We want to be very flexible in that and the message has been given to them very clearly about it, that only the openers will stay stagnant unless it’s a Super Over or it’s a five-over game. But otherwise, the openers will stay the same.”Related

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Rohit and Virat Kohli have been India’s constants at the top of the order, and so far they’ve put on stands of 22, 12, 1 and 11. This wasn’t a matter of concern to the team management in the first round, because the openers were getting out early, looking to play aggressively, and those losses weren’t a dampener on the rest of the batting order, with the challenging surfaces of the USA not calling for power-hitting.Now, though, with pitches in the Super Eight stage getting better to bat on, with conditions calling for a little more inventiveness and power, there might be a bit more concern around Rohit and Kohli.India have some breathing space, having opened the Super Eight with a win, but two familiar scenarios played themselves out in that match against Afghanistan. Rohit scored six off nine deliveries from the left-arm quick Fazalhaq Farooqi and got out to him. Since 2022, he has struck at just 120.12 against left-arm pace, a variety of bowling he will likely face in India’s remaining matches. Bangladesh, their next opponents in their Super Eight group, have Mustafizur Rahman, and Australia Mitchell Starc.Then the offspinner Mohammad Nabi rocked up and bowled through the powerplay without conceding a boundary to either Rohit or Kohli, both right-hand batters, conceding nine off 12 balls to the pair. Eventually, it was the left-hand batter at No. 3, Rishabh Pant, who innovated against Nabi and salvaged the powerplay for India.Kohli looked in better touch than Rohit, and batter for longer, but that is not necessarily a good thing in T20s. An opener batting into the ninth over and going at a run a ball on a pitch that isn’t treacherous can be counterproductive. You could even make the argument that an opener getting out for a single-digit score having faced single-digit balls is better than a run-a-ball 24.Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli have put on 22, 12, 1 and 11 in India’s four matches so far•ICC via Getty ImagesThen, in case you feel out of form, how do you play yourself into form in a tournament with such a short turnaround between matches? Perhaps that’s why both Rohit and Kohli turned up for optional nets in the one-day gap India had between the Afghanistan and Bangladesh matches, this after having travelled from Barbados to Antigua on the evening of the Afghanistan match.Batting coach Vikram Rathour was asked whether he was happy India were winning even without any major contribution from Kohli so far. Rathour said he wasn’t. “I’m not happy. I would love if he gets going and scores more runs,” he said. “But yeah, it is good that when you are challenged at times and you know the guys who are not getting too much of batting in India sometimes, they are the ones who put up scores. Our middle order came to play. So it was good to see.”Bangladesh can test India with left-arm pace and spin so it will be a challenge for the openers again. “They’re a good unit. They have a lot of guys who can [challenge us with] spin bowling and they are good in certain conditions,” Rathour said, but he wasn’t speaking in the context of India’s openers. “And these conditions do suit them a little as a team because the wickets seem to have a bit of help for the spinners and they do have spinners in their team. But again, in this format I think every team is a tough team.”I don’t believe there is any contest in T20 cricket which is an easy contest. It might look like [it] in the end, I mean today [against Afghanistan] we won by almost 50 runs, so it looks easy but I’m sure when the game was on it felt pretty tight.”That last bit tells you a lot about how the contest felt in the first half of India’s innings. Kohli and Rohit are among the greatest batters India has produced. They take pride in continuing to earn their places in the side, and set an example with their work ethic. This is surely not the time to second-guess the combination India have gone with. And they have the batting depth and the bowling attack to make up for any shortcomings at the top of the order.Still, the openers will want to be at their best by the time they face bigger opponents. They don’t want Rohit’s proclamation about their being the only constants turn into famous last words.

Though there is ostensibly an organisation to look after their needs, it doesn’t really fulfil that purpose

Karthik Krishnaswamy17-Jul-2024On June 30, BCCI secretary Jay Shah announced a reward of Rs 125 crore (about US$15 million) for India’s victorious T20 World Cup contingent.On July 2, Sandeep Patil appealed to the BCCI via newspaper column to provide financial aid for the treatment of his former India team-mate Aunshuman Gaekwad, who is currently battling cancer in London. Patil wrote that he and Dilip Vengsarkar had sought BCCI treasurer Ashish Shelar’s help on this. “I’m sure he will facilitate this and, at the risk of sounding macabre, save Anshu’s life.”Eleven days later, Kapil Dev stepped in. “I know the Board will take care of him,” he wrote in a letter to the BCCI. “We are not compelling anyone. Any help for Anshu will have to come from your heart.”Related

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Last Sunday, the BCCI announced that it would release Rs 1 crore (about $119,000) for Gaekwad’s treatment.If these two events – the windfall for the World Cup winners, the plight of the former player and coach – don’t already strike you as juxtaposable, throw in this fact: Gaekwad is the president of the Indian Cricketers’ Association, the official, BCCI-recognised body responsible for the welfare of retired cricketers.The ICA, which came into existence in 2019, has through its brief history been more notable for what it isn’t than what it is. Its membership is restricted only to former players, and it isn’t affiliated to the World Cricketers’ Association (formerly known as the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations). The ICA falls well short of being a genuine player union, and it falls short by design. Even the Lodha Committee – tasked by the Supreme Court to recommend sweeping reforms to the BCCI in the wake of the IPL betting scandal of 2013 – specified, when it called for the formation of the ICA, that it would not act as a union.India and Pakistan remain the only two major cricketing nations without a recognised players’ body.

The BCCI’s munificence towards those at the top of the player pyramid can be viewed as a mechanism for weakening the collectivising impulse within them

Against this backdrop, Shah’s reward begins to look like, well, a Shah’s reward. Who sat and decided what the players, coaches and selectors – all of whom are among the beneficiaries – would receive as a performance bonus? Did the players, coaches and selectors have a say? Or was it all decided, as it seemed to the outside world, arbitrarily, minutes before it went out on X, formerly Twitter?And if the BCCI can make such a decision so quickly, why does it take so long to take notice of other matters?These questions are, of course, rhetorical, because this is how things have always been.The BCCI is the richest cricket board in the world, by far. India’s cricketers are among the richest in the world too, but there’s a caveat here. It’s true – well, kind of – if you’re talking about India the cricket team, but not so much about Indian cricketers at large. Most of the professional cricketers who play in the BCCI’s senior tournaments aren’t contracted in the IPL or the WPL, where the most money is concentrated. They aren’t contracted by their domestic teams either, despite a growing demand for this to happen, and continue to mostly get by on match fees.It’s a precarious way to earn a livelihood, in a career that stretches into your late 30s if you’re lucky. A measure of this precarity came when Covid-19 tore through the 2020-21 domestic season, forcing the cancellation of the Ranji Trophy, the tournament with the most match days and therefore, the highest earning potential. Because of this, the average male domestic player, ordinarily earning somewhere around Rs 12-14 lakh per season (about $15,500 at the current exchange rate), stood to take home something in the region of Rs 3-4 lakh ($4800) for 2020-21.A PCA event in 2023. The UK’s PCA is a full-fledged players’ organisation of the sort India and Pakistan lack•Nathan Stirk/Getty ImagesThe BCCI eventually paid the players 50% of their normal match fees for tournaments cancelled in 2020-21, but that compensation only arrived in January 2022. Another delay to place next to the promptness of the World Cup reward announcement. Or next to another delay: it took the BCCI nearly 15 months to disburse the prize money – awarded not by them but by the ICC – to India’s squad for their runners-up finish at the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup.The bigger picture is clear enough. There are two Cs in BCCI, and Control comes before Cricket. To this end, it has historically done everything in its power to prevent players from organising – even the Lodha Committee, so adversarial towards the BCCI in so many respects, took on board its “apprehension of unionisation”. Even the BCCI’s munificence towards those at the top of the player pyramid can be viewed through this prism, as a mechanism for weakening the collectivising impulse within them.It isn’t unknown for top international players to look out for their less fortunate colleagues. In 2017, for instance, Australia’s biggest stars rejected a financial deal from Cricket Australia that would make them richer at the expense of domestic players, and stood their ground through a bitter and protracted dispute. It’s reasonable to assume that India’s international superstars worry about the livelihoods of their Ranji Trophy team-mates and their counterparts in the women’s system, but there’s no real way for them to do anything about it. They can ask the BCCI nicely, but that’s about it, in the absence of an Indian equivalent of the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) or Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA).What exists in this hypothetical body’s place, the ICA, seems to have little scope even to serve the needs of the retired players it represents, including its president. Like everything and everyone else in Indian cricket, it can only appeal to the goodness of the BCCI’s heart.

Maiden Test century follows hot on heels of 95 against West Indies, with more still to come

Vithushan Ehantharajah23-Aug-2024England’s wicketkeeping culture war has raged on for decades. But on Friday, if only for one day, there was peace in the world.A calming equilibrium was established in a void usually filled with conversations pitting technique against tenacity, catching percentages against batting average. A fresh, welcome relief.As Jonny Bairstow and Ben Foakes bagged County Championship half-centuries in Scarborough and south London respectively, Manchester belonged to Jamie Smith and his first Test century. Two impressive careers carry on off-Broadway as Smith takes centre stage for a run that already looks like outlasting either of theirs.Of course, Smith will eventually get sucked into that debate. Already, people are wondering if he needs the gloves at all – his batting is good enough to command a top-six spot outright, even if he only finds himself there because of Ben Stokes’ torn hamstring. But there is no need to get bogged down in any of that just yet. He will be around for a good while.His innings of 111 contained gear shifts, soothing drives and the odd outlandish whip to the leg side, and came one match after he had fallen short of his century by five runs in the third Test against West Indies. At the time of that innings, Smith had been happy with his lot, but he did anticipate feeling “a little bit gutted in a couple of days”. That sorrow never came, and the wait has been no wait at all.Smith showed patience throughout, particularly on Friday morning, taking 39 deliveries for the 28 runs required for his 11th first-class century. His marshalling of Gus Atkinson was particularly mature, helped by the fact that Atkinson can hold his own. The Surrey pair embraced after Smith tucked the ball off his toes for two runs to move to 100, before a subdued raising of his bat and helmet towards the dressing-room and the stands.That reaction was in step with what Surrey’s and England’s age-group coaches have said about Smith; he’s comfortable in his skin, mature beyond his years, and has steadfast belief in the skill at his disposal. He only turned 24 last month, but it feels as if he has been around the block. The nonplussed celebration of a moment every cricketer dreams about, but few ever experience, was a case of point.But beneath the calm exterior was a profound sense of pride. His parents were at the ground, along with his girlfriend, with whom he is expecting his first child. Messages from those watching on from afar were picked up once he walked off the field at stumps, each of them reinforcing the scale of his achievement to have even made it this far.”I probably didn’t show it, but inwardly I was obviously very happy with that milestone and I guess it’s proud,” he said. “I think, it’s when you look back and I guess it’s your phone; it sort of blows up with people that have either watched it or have played a part in your journey, messaging their congratulations.Smith cuts through the off side during his morning stand with Atkinson•AFP/Getty Images”My family are here, my girlfriend was here, so for them to experience it as well, people that played a significant part of being on the journey the whole way, I guess the overriding feeling is definitely pride.”As it happens, one of his earliest champions was sat on the Sri Lanka balcony. Ian Bell, currently acting as batting coach for the tourists, worked with Smith while coaching the England Lions. They also spent the last month together with Birmingham Phoenix in the men’s Hundred, where Bell would bait Smith that he couldn’t wait to arm Sri Lanka with the necessary information to best Smith.Speaking before Smith’s press conference, Bell could not withhold his pride. It was in 2023, on an A tour to Sri Lanka, that Smith struck the fastest century by a Lions batter which led Bell to rave about the keeper-batter to anyone and everyone. “Yeah, annoying,” was Bell’s first response when asked what he made of Smith’s progression to this moment. But the praise was not far behind.”I think he’s going to be a world-class player for England over a long period of time. He is class. And the players have acknowledged that it’s up to us now to find ways of getting him out in this series.”Fair play to him. Today, the game was on the line this morning, and the players have talked about it. We probably weren’t our best for that first hour, and he showed his class as well.Related

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“And you know, the small part that I suppose played in his development; I’ve watched a guy who’s worked extremely hard. He’s confident, and he’s taken to international cricket with ease. Even his celebration just shows the kind of person he is. And I’m sure he’s going to be a massive part of this England team in all formats to come over a long time.”Given Bell’s 118 Tests, he is as sage a judge as any when it comes to assessing what it takes to excel at this level. And Smith is already excellent. Granted, we are only five innings in, but the 318 runs at an average of 63.60, and the three fifty-plus scores speak of a cricketer tailormade for the big time. And it speaks volumes that, of all the talented keepers England have had behind the stumps, at 24 years and 40 days, he is the youngest of them to score a Test century.His glovework has been solid, with 18 catches so far, though he did miss a chance to register his first stumping on Wednesday, failing to gather a full dart from Shoaib Bashir when Sri Lanka skipper Dhananjaya de Silva had 65 to his name. And on Friday, his enthusiasm saw him trigger a rare no-ball law, with his gloves not “wholly behind the stumps”, which was flagged when England reviewed an LBW shout against the unbeaten Kamindu Mendis. Smith admitted he was not totally up to speed with the nature of his indiscretion. “I’ll know the law moving forward,” he said with a smirk.Neither were costly; Bashir eventually snared Dhananjaya for 74, and DRS would have stuck with the on-field not-out decision on umpire’s call for the impact into the stumps. But it was at least a reminder to Smith of the challenges within Test cricket. Not that he was under any illusions that all this was a piece of cake, despite how he has made it seem.”It’s not easy at all, no,” Smith said. “I think everyone knows, especially the way you play cricket, that there’s going to be ups and downs. I think that’s what it is and you’re riding the wave a little bit at the moment.”There’s going to be times when you’re going to be out of form, out of nick, and there’s going to be that judgement coming. When you do feel really good about yourself and the way you’re playing, it’s almost trying to take advantage of that as you can.”

The South Africa and MI Cape Town batter talks about his start in the game, his successful 2024, and about being mentored by Hashim Amla

Firdose Moonda08-Feb-20256:28

Ryan Rickelton: “With T20s, there’s a lot more pressure on every delivery”

Players often remind us that Test cricket is thus named because of the challenges it poses, but for Ryan Rickelton there was something more difficult: T20s.South Africa’s first Test double-centurion since 2016 found scoring those runs easier than the 303 he compiled in seven innings for finalists MI Cape Town in this season of the SA20.”I grew up wanting to be a Test player and thought that in T20, you can just whack a few, but T20 cricket is flipping hard. It’s different, but it is harder,” Rickelton says.Related

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“Test cricket is very hard, but with T20s, there’s a lot more pressure on every delivery. In Test cricket, you can bide your time and work your way through it at a lower intensity. In T20s, you’ve got to score [off] every ball. There’s always pressure on you, internally, externally, there’s more detailed analysis on you as a player, and against your opposition. They’re always trying to hit your weaknesses. There’s a lot more to it than it seems.”And it took some time for Rickelton to work that out. While he has largely consistently averaged high in first-class cricket, he had a pronounced blip in T20s a little over three years into his career, after which his average came back up to 25 and his strike rate to over 130 last year. He finished as the top scorer at the 2023-24 SA20, which was around the time that he began to think about how to change techniques for different formats after talking to Hashim Amla, his batting coach at Lions and MI Cape Town.Related

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Amla was once regarded as a red-ball specialist but he broke the record for being the fastest player to 5000 ODI runs and ended his career with the most hundreds in the format for South Africa.”I spend a lot of time with Hash,” Rickelton says. “He was a phenomenal player and a calm guy in the way he dealt with his success and his failure, so that’s awesome. It’s just hard to obviously deal with both sides of the spectrum, but he was an incredible player and he’s a very good coach.”Batting is very relationship-based, and having spent three years with him, I can trust his eyes and his perspective as a coach. It’s also nice to have someone that’s around frequently. Even when I move up into the Proteas space, he’s still the guy I call back. He’ll watch [me play] and I’ll toss some thoughts to him. It doesn’t mean that I disregard anyone else’s [views], but the guys that can see little intricacies coming into your game or what you’re thinking behind the scenes are the kind that can relate to you a little bit more.”Under Amla’s guidance, Rickelton had the best year of his career in 2024, bookended by topping the SA20 run charts and scoring his first Test hundred, against Sri Lanka in December. Suddenly, high-level cricket in any format seemed fairly easy for a batter who wasn’t even sure South Africa was where he wanted to carve out his career.Growing up as the son of the director of sports at one of the country’s most prestigious schools, St Stithians, Rickelton finished school with no idea what to do next, so he moved to New Zealand to try and play for New Zealand, he says.”My dad’s best mate worked for Wellington Blaze. He called my dad and said, ‘Why don’t you just send Ryan over?’ I was young, so I went.”Rickelton’s 259 against Pakistan is the joint seventh-highest Test score for South Africa•Rodger Bosch /AFP/Getty ImagesHe describes his New Zealand stint as something of a gap year, where he discovered how little he actually knew.”I still don’t understand why I went. I think it was just that I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to go to Stellenbosch [university] because all my mates were going there, but I think that could have derailed a few things. It was one of those things where I thought: let me just go have a look. We chatted to Grant Elliott [former Wellington and New Zealand allrounder] as well, and he said [it’s] a great set-up at Wellington – and it was. Maybe if I went two-three years later, I would have probably stayed there. But I was just a kid. All my mates were on this side, having a good time, my whole family was on this side, and I’m 12 hours ahead in Wellington, not really sure who to talk to or what to do. It really forced me to grow up quite quickly.”Though Wellington offered Rickelton the opportunity to come back for another season, he decided to stay at home and started studying at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2016. The coach of the university cricket team, Richard das Neves, the current Titans interim head coach, knew Rickelton from the Johannesburg club cricket scene and took him under his wing.”I did a finance degree through UJ for three years, played my Varsity Cup, and I always kind of said to myself at the end of this degree, I’ll know if I’m good enough or not. I’ll give it these three years, I’ll be in and around the Gauteng system. I got an amateur contract and gave myself three years to have a full crack at it. And if it worked, cool. If not, I didn’t want to be just plodding about. It was either going to work or it wasn’t.”It worked. By the time Rickelton graduated, he was upgraded to a professional contract. And so began the journey to try to earn national honours.He was third on the One-Day Cup batting charts in 2019-20 and fifth in the 2021-22 first-class competition. In March 2022, he got his first call-up to South Africa’s Test squad, for a series against Bangladesh. Several first-choice batters were unavailable since the series clashed with the IPL, so Rickelton played both games and went on the 2022 tour to England, where he played one match.Rickelton (seated, first from right) was part of the South African side that reached the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup final•Matthew Lewis/ICC/Getty ImagesHe scored 224 runs at 22.4 from his first seven Tests and did not look convincing.”I was just trying to make it work and I had played a little bit of county cricket, but the conditions where I played [Northamptonshire] compared to that Test match [at The Oval] was chalk and cheese,” he says. “I was facing Stuart Broad and Jimmy [Anderson] at a packed house in The Oval on a green one, and that was always going to test me. Obviously, we got hammered in that Test and it wasn’t pretty. But you look back and say, well, at least I got the opportunity. I could physically learn and see for myself.”Rickelton was ruled out of South Africa’s Test tour to Australia in December 2022 as the board’s medical team was concerned about a bone spur in his ankle. He says he chose not to have surgery for it at the time under the advice of his own physiotherapist, who said he could go two years without having surgery and could keep playing for the summer, one Rickelton said he “was not willing to miss.”The physio’s advice seemed justified when Rickelton scored four hundreds across formats in five weeks while South Africa crashed and burned in Australia. “It looked like a tough tour,” he says.He eventually had the surgery in April 2023, which ruled him out of county cricket that summer but also gave him the best chance of playing for South Africa. However, he had to bide his time. Rickelton has mostly been seen as the reserve batter and only got a regular run this summer after Wiaan Mulder broke a finger in the Durban Test against Sri Lanka.Fortuitously, in Gqeberha, Rickelton was also given the chance to play higher up the order, which is what he prefers, so he knew it was his time to shine. The pressure he always feels in T20 was on him.In three SA20 seasons so far, Rickelton has scored nearly 1000 runs at a strike rate of 161.28•SA20″I’d only played seven games at the time and there was that question mark over me from you guys [media] and from myself as well: ‘Can he do it?’ So when I walked in there, I locked in. I was chatting to Hash about just trying to watch players and how guys aren’t sticking to their strengths, and trying to emphasise what I do and do it well for the whole day, if not the next day as well. It was very against how people think I play, but I can do that as well and spend lots of time out the crease and score slowly if it’s needed.”In the end, he described the knock as one of relief, not celebration, and it was followed by three low scores. Then came 2025 and the 259 at Newlands against Pakistan and Rickelton is starting to realise his life has changed.”To get 250 is definitely not something I would have thought of, but as I walked off, KG [Rabada] gave me a hug and he said, ‘This is so massive. This is huge.’ And I told him I actually [didn’t] understand it. Maybe you don’t know what it really means until late in your career,” Rickelton says. “It has maybe increased my profile and it was incredible to be part of history. I can’t remember too much, but I can remember the roar for both the hundred and the double. It was spectacular.”The accolades have kept coming. At Newlands, Rickelton has established himself as one of MI Cape Town’s darlings and his opening partnership with Rassie van der Dussen is the most reliable in the competition. His three half-centuries in this SA20 have been scored with freedom and confidence, the signs of a player who is comfortable in his own game, and it’s a feeling he hopes to take into his first IPL later this year.”I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve chatted to lots of guys about the IPL and you hear all these things and you think, ‘This is big boy stuff.’ I’m probably a little bit nervous of how the whole two or three months are going to play out. But you never know if you have a good two months here anything can happen.”That is how Rickelton is approaching things from now on: being open to the possibility of achieving things he didn’t dream of. “I’ve got a big six months ahead. If I can get a bit of the rub of the green, work hard and things can go my way, a lot can change quite quickly. I know I’m going to fail along the way. It’s normal, but just try and balance it out and say, you know what, in the bigger picture, if I have a good six months now, anything can happen. A year ago, I wasn’t sitting near here. Today, after one tournament, everyone says: this guy knows what he’s doing.”However difficult or easy it is.

Though just two international matches old, Rhys Mariu has given enough evidence of being a good fit for the highest level

Deivarayan Muthu23-Aug-2025Rhys Mariu was a run machine at the 2024-25 Plunket Shield, churning out 747 runs in 11 innings at an average of 74.70 for Canterbury.The 23-year-old Mariu’s remarkable consistency earned him a New Zealand ODI debut against Pakistan towards the end of the previous home summer. In his second match, he made a fairly smooth transition into top-flight cricket with 58 off 61 balls in Mount Maunganui.Mariu has always had the potential – he was New Zealand’s highest run-getter in the 2020 Under-19 World Cup. More mature now, he has found a method to pile on the runs in red-ball cricket too.Related

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“I think I found a good formula for batting last season,” Mariu told ESPNcricinfo on the sidelines of a camp at the Chennai Super Kings Academy in Chennai in June. “Obviously, with cricket you go through patches of scoring runs and not scoring runs. But I think I just found a good base and sort of worked through that and managed to find some success through that.”Then it was just about staying level, I guess. I was understanding that I’m not always going to be scoring lots of runs, so just trying to stay consistent with it even if it’s not successful. But at that time, I was lucky that it went well.”Mariu credits mental-skills coach John Quinn, who has also worked with Rugby NZ and Black Sticks Men (hockey team), for his success in the previous season.”Yeah, I think it’s mainly down to my mental routines and all that I’ve been working on,” Mariu said. “I work closely with John Quinn back home – a mental skills coach – and he’s really helped me sort of find a routine that I can repeat, and it just keeps me consistent. And when I am tired or things are changing, then I can just go back to that. It’s helped me play long innings as well.”Rhys Mariu hones his skills at the Super Kings Academy•Super Kings AcademyMariu hails from a cricketing family. His father Marcus and older brother Josh represented Canterbury at the Hawke Cup level. When he was younger, Mariu had even operated the manual scoreboard for Canterbury matches at Rangiora’s Mainpower Oval. Years later, he’s troubling the scorers with his prolific batting for Canterbury.”Dad played a little bit and it’s good playing with my brother,” Mariu said. “Obviously, I sort of just followed him [his father] in terms of choices to play cricket, but I was always [watching cricket] on TV and playing in the backyard, so it was good fun.”We would just sit up on the balcony and spend most of the day, especially four-dayers, just watching games and putting the numbers and names up, which was cool at the time. We just got paid 50 bucks a day [for operating the scoreboard], but it was just really good fun spending days with him [my brother] and some of our mates would also come down.”Like most New Zealanders, Mariu played a lot of sports while growing up, cycling through cricket, rugby, football and hockey. He believes that his hockey background has had a positive effect on his cricket.

“At this camp, I’ve worked on hitting straight, which is what I wanted to do coming over here […] Just keeping everything a bit more square-on and finding ways of hitting down the ground. So, that’s been the main work here”Rhys Mariu on the experience in Chennai

“Yeah, I think I’ve always been decent at sweeping just because I think that comes from playing hockey at school. That [sweep] has always come naturally to me.”Given his long reach and strong base, there are shades of Daryl Mitchell in Mariu, especially when he sweeps and reverse-sweeps. It was only fitting that Mitchell had handed Mariu his maiden international cap.”Yeah, it was pretty special with Daz presenting me that,” Mariu said. “He’s been really, really helpful with Canterbury and then making the jump up. He’s always let me know that if I have any questions or need anything, I can go to him. So, it’s nice having someone like that in your corner.”Mariu’s golden run last season included a career-best 240 in just his ninth game for Canterbury and first as captain, against Central Districts at Saxton Oval. His mammoth score led Canterbury to a ten-wicket win.”Yeah, it was a decent CD attack,” Mariu recalled. “I think the conditions were sort of in the favour of the batting team on those couple of days. And I think we just found good partners through that. Like, [Matt] Boyle was really helpful. He obviously had a hell of a knock there as well [116 from No. 4]. It was a young team and there was a really good vibe around for the whole week. Things just sort of fell into place in that game.””I think I’ve always been decent at sweeping just because I think that comes from playing hockey at school”•Getty ImagesMariu, however, wasn’t satisfied. He’s always hungry for runs and improvement. During the New Zealand winter, he travelled to Chennai and focussed on holding his shape for long enough and hitting the ball down the ground.”At this camp, I’ve worked on hitting straight, which is what I wanted to do coming over here,” Mariu said. “Sri [Sriram Krishnamurthy, former NZ pathway coach and current CSK Academy head coach] has been really good. Just keeping everything a bit more square-on and finding ways of hitting down the ground. So, that’s been the main work here.”In the recent past, Canterbury have supplied a number of players to the Black Caps, including Will O’Rourke, Zak Foulkes, Mitch Hay and Chad Bowes. Mariu draws inspiration from his domestic team-mates and hopes to emulate them.”Fults [Peter Fulton] and Brendon Donkers [the Canterbury coaches] have created a good environment,” Mariu said. “With a lot of Black Caps being churned out, success breeds success. It’s cool seeing those guys go up to the next level. It makes it feel like it’s less of a jump because you spend a lot of time with those guys and then you go see them play up high. It’s cool and it doesn’t make it seem too far away.”Mariu’s next assignment is an A team tour of South Africa, which comprises three one-dayers and two four-dayers. If Mariu can maintain his consistency, he might not be too far away from breaking into the Test side either.

Puja Pujara talks about how she came to write a book chronicling the career of her famous husband, the former India No. 3

S Sudarshanan26-May-2025A lot happens in a cricketer’s life. The binaries of wins and losses aside, there are various other ups and downs. For a cricketer’s family, they experience these vicariously when they hear from or watch and read about their loved one.Cheteshwar Pujara’s family might have been less aware of the ins and outs of his career than other cricketers’ families. Pujara, by his own admission, is a private person. Sharing his thoughts didn’t come naturally to him, and indeed, he did not want to put second-hand pressure on his family by telling them about the trials and stresses in his life. But he worked on opening up over the years and got better at it.His wife, Puja, did not follow cricket or know who Pujara was before marrying him. Coming to the sport afresh, she wanted to know more about it and took a deep interest in his career. Over time, she learnt more about the game and its various aspects. Inspired by Andre Agassi’s book, , she began journalling her experience as the wife of an India cricketer.An MBA graduate, Puja quit her corporate job, which she loved, after her wedding. When the couple’s first daughter was three, she wanted to get back to work, but decided that as Pujara’s manager, she didn’t have the time to give to a full-time job. On the other hand, accompanying him on long cricket tours would leave her with not a lot to do. Over the years, she had made notes about conversations with the Pujara family. Her father-in-law, Arvind, would describe their struggles from years gone by, talk about the challenges the family went through so Pujara could play cricket, and describe the bond Pujara shared with his mother. Puja would listen keenly, and thanks to her sharp memory, write it all down in her diary later.In 2021, Pujara suggested she collate her notes into a book. That had been Puja’s motive for keeping a journal, which she had not spoken of before – the hope that it might turn into a book someday. That book has now been published: is an unusual memoir, Puja’s account of the bumpy ride the family of a cricketer goes through. It belongs in a sparsely populated genre, of which the best known are perhaps the tour books of Frances Edmonds, wife of former England spinner Phil Edmonds, though those were more by way of humorous travelogues and therefore different in nature and tone from Puja’s book.”I had to be very prepared before suggesting [she] write the book,” Pujara says. “I was a little uncomfortable at times about what people would think about what I was doing or what my thought process was. But I told her I don’t mind [the book] because this is the truth and you have seen my journey.”On watching Pujara fend off body blows in Australia in 2021: “I don’t know if I have it in me to relive it again”•AFPPuja agrees. “I told him I am not going to portray you as a saint. You are a good human being, but the book won’t be just glorifying everything. There will be the hard parts and vulnerabilities. You have an inspiring journey, and I want someone to take inspiration.”I think most [cricketers’] partners would relate to what I’m saying – that you are riding the same highs and the same lows. And while it is easy to say, it is a whole new thing when you are actually experiencing it.”Puja had to get used to being a public figure after their marriage, and become aware that she needed to be careful of her image too, for the effects it might have on her husband’s. Even if she didn’t end up enhancing Pujara’s image, she did not want to damage it.It is relatively easy for a sportsperson to be in the public eye when things are going well. Pujara was in good form around the time of their courtship and marriage. The challenge came when the going got tough. When he was dropped for the Sydney Test in 2015, it was heartbreak for Puja, she says. She felt it like a personal loss and like the world had turned upside down. She was in Australia for the tour and did not want to go to the SCG to watch the match.That experience taught her the value of detachment – that as a family member, she needed to offer her husband support rather than having her own emotional reaction to the incident add to his distress. “I had to gather courage, swallow that news and be there for him in whatever way he needed,” she says. “While it is very disheartening, you have to understand that only 11 players can play. That somebody else’s family is happy that the other person is getting to play. It took time for me to mature… We realised over time that [being dropped] is fine, but I wouldn’t take away any disappointment I had at that point in time.”Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was not Pujara who broke the news of his omission in Sydney to Puja. He found it tough to give his family updates of that sort. He dealt with failures in his own way; instead of opening up, he would withdraw, trying to “protect the family” from disappointment.”He wouldn’t realise that he’s going through something,” Puja says. “I had to tell him, ‘Boss, I think you need to take a step back and just pause for a second. I feel you are not on your A game mentally. Let’s talk about it.’ In a country like India, things like mental health weren’t addressed until recently. You’re so used to the hardships and the difficult times that you don’t realise sometimes [that] you may need to seek help.”Stand by me: from not being a cricket fan before marriage, Puja went on to become her husband’s manager•BCCIPujara credits his wife with helping him deal with failures better. She helped him stick to his cricket routine when he didn’t want to, during a low phase. His county stint with Yorkshire between 2015 and 2018 also enabled him to open up. The mental conditioning coach at the club helped him be less hard on himself, making Pujara realise that scoring a fifty was an achievement too, not just a hundred. “That was the first time I realised that I need to switch off from the game, divert my mind and talk about my failures also,” Pujara says. “When you succeed, you know what you have done has worked for you. But when you fail, it isn’t always about the technique; it could be a very small thing – like, you are not resting well or not sleeping well.”While Puja could help her husband out with his mental battles, the blows inflicted by bowlers on the field were his alone to deal with. During the Brisbane Test in 2021, Pujara stood like an immovable force in the middle, staving off a bowling attack of Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon. He repeatedly took blows to his body – elbow, thigh, neck, finger – and on the helmet grille, while scoring a crucial second-innings fifty. As a fan or a viewer, those hits added to the narrative of the Test match. Not for the wife, though.”It was just a nightmare,” Puja says. “Watching it, I had a gush of many emotions all at once. I was worried and got in touch with the physio and team manager. I messaged so many people, because some of [the blows] were closer to the head and that was very scary. I don’t know if I have it in me to relive it again,” she laughs.When Pujara picked up his phone after the match, he saw a flood of text messages from her. “I am fine,” he wrote back. They spoke briefly and he rushed back to join the team celebrations for India’s second successive Test series win in Australia. “I was in pain, but it was a sweet pain because the Indian team had won the game and the series,” he says.A year and four series after his Gabba knock, Pujara was dropped again from the Indian Test side. He was recalled six months later and played eight more matches, the World Test Championship final in June 2023 being the last.Puja suggested a while ago that he look at life beyond playing cricket, and take up coaching or broadcasting, but he wasn’t on board then. Slowly his reluctance gave way and he took up some media work. He has been an expert on ESPNcricinfo’s match-analysis shows, which, he says, has enabled him to explore another side of the game and understand his own game better in retrospect.Pujara is 37. It has been close to two years since he last played for India, but he is not thinking about retirement just yet. The fire in him still burns. He enjoys the grind of preparing for a match, and the routines that help him stay hungry.Irrespective of what happens in his journey from here on, Pujara will know he has a pillar of support alongside him. The one who told his story to the world as she watched and lived it off the field.

The India batter went past the mark of 351 ODI sixes against South Africa in Ranchi

Sampath Bandarupalli30-Nov-2025Rise to the topRohit was not a prolific six-hitter at the beginning of his ODI career. He hit his first in his third innings – against Pakistan in Jaipur – but by the time he scored his maiden hundred in his 40th innings, in May 2010, he had only five sixes off 1023 balls faced.Three years later, against Australia in Bengaluru, Rohit let loose, smashing 16 sixes – a record for an ODI innings at the time – on his way to the first of three double-centuries. Until then, he had hit only 36 sixes in 102 ODI innings at a rate of 102.14 balls per six.