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Life is always full of surprises provided you have your eyes open. Today morning I had my eyes open i.e. I woke up early and found time to browse through the newspaper before I left for office. It had the following article:

WOMEN’S TENNIS

Archana packs off Sonal

Parija goes down fighting to Palkina; Ankita, Nungnadda move up

By Rajesh Korde/TNN
Pune: Almost six years ago, when Sonal Phadke was peaking, she had won her first seniors title in Indore defeating Archana Venkataraman in a thrilling encounter. However, the lanky Mumbai player could do precious little on Monday. Semi-finalist at the recent DSCL National championships in Delhi, Sonal certainly discovered that it was not her day as she lost rather tamely to Archana 3-6, 2-6 in the first round of $10,000 NECC-ITF women’s tennis tournament at Deccan Gymkhana. Playing a steady game devoid of frills, Archana hit the ball deep and hard, seldom making unforced errors. On the other hand, Sonal made numerous unforced errors and committed six double faults — three in each set.

Since months I had planned that I would be going to Deccan Gymkhana, Pune to watch Archana (from whom I learnt tennis in Bangalore) play. But as it normally happens I couldn’t make it and the next day even forgot about it. Today morning after reading through this article I was thrilled and wanted to tell everyone about it.
Reason – I am not sure. But may be it’s for the same reason as I like to see Sachin succeed. When you know certain people are good (as a person) you somehow want them to succeed and when you hear about their success it gives you a joy like nothing else can. Guess it reinforces your belief that good guys do not necessarily finish last (something that is often said about Rahul Dravid).

- (written 7th Nov'06)

ICC Champions Trophy Gets Some Credibility

Quite often you feel that people at the top don’t really deserve to be there. You actually know people who seem to be much better than these 'people at the top'. That’s when you get a feeling that there’s something wrong with the system. Yes, only when the system is wrong can undeserving people be at the top. I had a similar feeling about the ICC Champions Trophy.
The intention of any tournament should be that the best in the business should be rewarded. If this is not happening you are spoiling the entire scheme of things. You are spoiling a sacred game like cricket. Everything around us works that way or is at least supposed to work that way. Right from our childhood we have been rewarded when we have done something better than others or at least the correct way.
Since the inception of the ICC Champions trophy, Australia hadn’t even once won the trophy. And for me this was really surprising. A team that’s way ahead of the rest of world doesn’t win this cup even once! Does this mean that a team that has been virtually unchallenged for over a decade is not capable of winning the trophy? And look at the list of winners; it includes West Indies and India!! These are the most unpredictable teams in terms of performance. When a tournament allows such teams to win you naturally question the credibility of the tournament and it’s format.
Here I don’t want to say that only Australia should win all the tournaments but I don’t see a team that deserves to beat Australia, be a world leader and tell the world ‘look this is the kind of team that deserves to win and not Australia’. And nobody is anywhere near to even catching up with the Aussies.
I feel you don’t have awards/trophies to actually felicitate the deserving people. In fact people who design such tournaments take pride when the awards are won by truly deserving teams. That way they can boast that how correct they had designed the format that brought to light a truly deserving winner. And now ICC should be a proud body since at last a truly deserving team has won their ‘Champions trophy’ and a cameo from Sachin or Lara hasn’t upset it.

(written - 6th Nov' 06)