At a time when the entire media seems to be going hammer and tongs at the Indian cricket team, something that everyone has conveniently forgotten is that the players themselves are human beings with feelings in their hearts. Am sure none of the players performed badly out of their own choice. It so happened that things did not go well for them a few times. And that signaled the end of our world cup campaign (in fact this is a wake-up call for the ICC to review its tournament structure; 3 matches is too short a time to decide the “super 8s”. If two of the stronger teams in the world are rather prematurely out of the biggest tourney in cricket, then it simply means the process in wrong! Anyway, that’s a topic worthy of another debate)
My heart goes out to Dravid who very rightly said “No one feels as bad as the players themselves”. How very true! Let's think of our younger years... Whenever we fared badly in an exam, did we not go home in pristine gloom? How would we have felt if someone else had humiliated us (in public) for those failures?
Just imagine! They are people who were till very recently celebrated so much in the country! Now the public stoops down to the oh-so-cheap levels of “stoning” their houses! What kind of emotional instability is this! Just think, will everyone accept it if I go and stone my barber’s house because he did not cut my hair the way I wanted it? Eventually it boils down to that right? We are angry at the team for not performing well na? It's the same thing.
My blood boils at the thought of a photo that I saw today morning in a newspaper. A group of people in Patna had put up posters of Indian players on a wall. There was a big label above the posters which said "Greg Chappell and his army of eunuchs". And the posters showed images of our players modified to look like eunuchs. And the "angry crowd" was hitting the posters with slippers and shoes. It looked so very gross!! How silly, stupid, cheap and ugly can people get!
And what can I say about a newspaper which puts this picture on its front page?!
Sigh.
Or maybe *SIGH*.
Let's get this clear: we ALL are upset about the early exit of the Indian team from the world cup. Am not saying the team performed well. They did falter. But are we not reacting too much? All we can do now is to offer support and solace to the players who themselves will be returning with their heads bowed.
I can very well predict what will happen a couple of months from now; our cricket team will perform some really great deed and the ever-mercurial media (now bolstered with support from instantaneous journos on blogs) will start crying hosannas in praise of the team.
It has happened so many times before and it WILL happen in the future too.
Man, being a celeb is such a thankless job!
In conclusion I just want to remind all of us that nothing stays the same way forever. Things are bound to get better with time. But in the short span of time when something irks us, please let us not lose our senses and do something that we'll regret later. Let us help our players lick their wounds and get back to the field as soon as possible.
After all, success is not about not falling down; it's about how high you bounce back after falling down.
3 comments:
A very good begining. Keep going.
Hey, even I felt that the way people reacted was cheap, to say the least. But your post really put things in a perspective favourable for the players. Guess, I too am now on the "Let's support our chaps" team :-)
Very true. That's why they say that the public mentality(read mob mentality) is fickle! Still, I feel our players should have put in more efforts. The way they played didn't prove that they were one of the stronger teams. In fact, I wondered if we sent out a bunch of people who were too confident of their own abilities and neglected the team.
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