Live Cricket Scores: The World’s Most Expensive Way to Watch a Dot-Ball By the time you refresh the app for the fourth time in thirty seconds, a Ukrainian drone has probably changed postal codes, a Japanese pension fund has quietly bought another slice of Sri Lankan sovereign debt, and somewhere in Lagos a teenager just…
The Curious Case of Suryakumar Yadav: How a Middle-Class Mumbaikar Became the UN Secretary-General of T20 Cricket By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Arabian Sea NEW DELHI—Late one humid evening, as Delhi’s air flirted with the toxicity levels of a small chemical spill, Suryakumar Yadav—population 1.4 billion’s newest export—waltzed down the…
Mustafizur Rahman: The Cutter That Cut Through Geopolitics By Our Man in Dhaka, Nursing a Cup of Over-Street Tea To the uninitiated, Mustafizur Rahman is merely a 6’2″ left-arm fast bowler who grips a cricket ball like a barista handles a scalding latte—delicately, yet with lethal intent. To the rest of us, he is a…
Shubman Gill: The Accidental Messiah of a Nation That Can’t Decide Whether It Needs Saving or a Netflix Subscription By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a 3 a.m. doom-scroll in economy class NEW DELHI—In the blue haze of Narendra Modi Stadium—capacity 132,000, or roughly the population of Reykjavik poured into a concrete cereal bowl—Shubman Gill…
Mohammad Nawaz and the Beautiful, Pointless Game By Our Man in the Press Box, Still Wondering Why He Bothered to Show Up For the uninitiated, Mohammad Nawaz is a 29-year-old left-arm spinner from Rawalpindi who can, on good days, also swing a bat like a man who has just discovered fire. In the grand tapestry…
Pakistan vs Sri Lanka: A Subcontinental Bout Where Everyone Loses, but the World Still Scores a Ticket By the time the floodlights at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium flickered on, the only thing brighter than the wattage was the collective global anxiety about what, exactly, we were watching. A cricket match? A geopolitical morality play? Or merely…
The planet keeps smouldering—literally in some latitudes—but 1.2 billion eyeballs still found time last week to watch 22 women in mint-green and navy-blue polyester chase a red leather sphere across a rectangle in Mumbai. Australia Women vs India Women—sounds almost quaint, like an academic debate on colonial legacies, except the only thesis being defended was…
**Sanju Samson: Cricket’s Beautiful Enigma and the Global Theater of Almost-Greatness** In the grand, often absurd opera of international cricket—where nations outsource their self-esteem to eleven men in polyester—Sanju Samson has become a recurring aria of promise, heartbreak, and selective amnesia. To the uninitiated, he is merely another Indian cricketer with a Instagram-ready smile and…
In the grand carnival of global cricket—where every dropped catch reverberates from Mumbai bars to Melbourne betting syndicates—few names carry the faintly ecclesiastical ring of Andy Pycroft. To the uninitiated, he sounds like a minor character from an Evelyn Waugh novel who accidentally wandered onto the pitch clutching a gin rickey instead of a bat….
**The Curious Case of Saif Hassan: Cricket’s Accidental Philosopher in an Age of Global Chaos** In a world where billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns and algorithms decide what breakfast cereal best matches your existential dread, Saif Hassan stands at the crease—both literally and metaphorically—representing something far more significant than his batting average might…
In the grand theatre of geopolitics, nothing screams “late-stage empire” quite like two nations—each with a per-capita GDP smaller than the average Silicon Valley intern’s coffee allowance—being pitted against one another on the world’s most conspicuous stage. Bangladesh versus Afghanistan is not merely a fixture on the cricket calendar; it is the latest episode in…
**The Accidental Symbol: How Sahibzada Farhan Became Cricket’s Reluctant Metaphor for Modern Pakistan** In the grand theater of international cricket, where nations outsource their dignity to eleven men in pajamas, Sahibzada Farhan’s journey from Peshawar’s dusty streets to Pakistan’s mercurial middle order reads less like a sports story and more like a Kafka novella written…
