Life Etc Etc

The Indian Wells Masters is one tournament on the ATP calendar I've consistently enjoyed over the last couple of years. Not only is the tournament well attended but it also arrives on the cusp of spring just when everything is about to look up in the Northern Hemisphere. I still remember the humdinger of a final  from last year and was particularly disappointed that the defending champion Juan Martin Del Potro was unable to defend his title this year because of a nagging knee injury. The magnificence of Indian Wells (Courtesy: Tennis Tours ) The Draw This year though the deck was firmly stacked in favor of the number one seed Novak Djokovic who was in imperious form leading up to the tournament. Novak led the upper half of the draw and was ably supported by mercurially talented players such as Dominic Thiem, Alexander Zverev, Nick Kyrgios and Milos Raonic. Stefanos Tsitsipas who ousted Novak at the Toronto Masters and Federer at the Australian Open looked set to be dark h

We won...! We won...! We won...!  For kids like me who grew up in the 90s the thought of India beating Australia in Australia was as inconceivable as dating a Ms. World or a Ms. Universe (but yours truly did think of... ahem! ahem! let's not go there). Yeah, stars have to be seriously aligned for a victory such as this to happen and stars were indeed aligned when Warner, Cameron and Steve were all sent off on a vacation for playing around with a certain  tape . That vacation helped the Indian Team succeed in their triennial vocation. Mantra for Steve / Warner / Cameron : If you use tape your team will scrape . The above mantra was just the beginning, I set out on a journey where I personally uncovered several such lessons while watching this coma inducing, patience numbing, sometimes nerve wracking but ultimately gratifying series. Let's take a look at all the lessons I've grasped one by one: Players with rock solid and dependable techniques don't get IPL contracts

The year 2018 will go down in history as one of the great years for sports and today my friends I present sporting gold from the first half of 2018 (in chronological order). Here are some truly classic matches and moments which I had the pleasure of watching this year. Deontay Wilder vs Luis Ortiz: Two unbeaten heavyweights met for the WBC World Heavyweight Championship in March. Hard hitting American Deontay Wilder defended his world title against the Cuban technical specialist Luis Ortiz . Both the heavyweights approached the bout in contrasting manners. While Wilder searched for the one punch knockout Ortiz made life difficult for Wilder by adopting a sideways stance and picking him at will with his precise lefts. Wilder finally broke through in the fifth round to knock Ortiz down only for Ortiz to recover and give Wilder the beating of his life in the seventh. Wilder narrowly escaped a certain KO and came back with ferocious rights of his own before finally finishing off Ort

It's IPL time, the time of the year where cricket turns from a gentleman's game into a three ringed circus for the stars, the people and the players. It's hard to believe that it's been 10 long years since the IPL started but I just seem to remember it like yesterday. As soon I thought about the first IPL I remembered some tight finishes, some great performances, raw emotion, glamour that was on display and some utterly forgettable moments. So here are 10 random things I remember about the first IPL: Teams of the first IPL <Courtesy: Reddit > Akshay Kumar , the brand ambassador (Oh! the brand ambassadors was one way franchises burnt their hard earned money during the first IPL) for Delhi Daredevils (DD) zip-lined his way into the ground for an IPL match. DD followed his example of daredevilry all throughout the league phase before their stunt went all wrong crashing them into the ground in the semis .            Ricky Ponting (yes he played in the

It's hard to be a casual cricket fan, there are so many things you don't know when you don't watch cricket regularly. I watched a grand total of half a cricket match in the last one year ( the Indian Chase in the ICC Cricket World Cup for Women ) before watching the last three overs of today's final . The last ball six revived my interest in the game and here are some of the most important things I've learnt about today's cricket in the last few hours since the final: Washington and Sundar are one and the same person . Suresh Raina has not retired and still plays occasionally for India.  ' DK ' is the superhuman alter ego of mild mannered Indian wicket-keeper batsman Dinesh Karthik and when he's in full flow he can hit sixes about as easily as Vijay Shankar can miss them. Vijay Shankar is not a relative of Indian sitar stalwart Ravi Shankar even though I almost felt he was using a sitar to bat after missing the number of balls he d

As a sports fan, I have endured countless debacles over the last few decades. I still remember the Indian Cricket Team collapsing like a pack of cards in the 96' World Cup semi-final , can recall Dhanraj Pillay's tears when India lost a medal chance by a whisker in the 2000 Olympics, still dwell upon what would have happened if Saurav Ganguly elected to bat first instead of putting Australia in on a flat track in the 2003 Final and still find it hard to digest Andy Roddick's  ultra narrow loss to Roger Federer in the 2009 Wimbledon Final . Every hurt is different, some fade away with time and some live on, only to flare up every time a similar incident happens. A devasted Mithali Raj along with Harmanpreet Kaur  Today those hurts of the past flared up again when an inexperienced but talented Indian team lost to an English team resembling a well oiled machinery. This was not just any match it was the World Cup Final and it was a final we were winning. As someone

It was a perfectly drab morning and I was gearing up for the day ahead by peering through the sports headlines. Nothing exciting struck me until I laid my eyes upon an ongoing quarterfinal match at The Queen's Club Championship between Tomas Berdych and Feliciano Lopez . Now Berdych vs Lopez is not exactly a match-up to crave about like Federer vs Nadal. Both men are in their 30's which is the age where most players retire. Both men are seemingly past their prime and both haven't exactly set the tennis world on fire in the recent past. If it was another day or time I would have moved on to do something else but today was different, I decided to go ahead and watch the match. You ask me why? I still wonder why? Is it because that both Berdych and Lopez are genuine grass court players? Is it because that on their day both men are extremely dangerous players? Is it because that it was a match up of styles between the power of Berdych and the silken finesse of Lo

The turn of the millennium signaled the business end of school for me. With the retirement of most of my favorites I no longer found the time to follow and watch tennis. But all of that was about to change with the comeback of a  hero  whom no one gave a chance. 2001 Wimbledon I had just finished school when the 2001 Wimbledon Championships rolled in. I had plenty of time on hand but had no interest in the championships as Pete Sampras the defending champion was in ominous form and with all due respect to Sampras I had no interest seeing him lift the trophy once again. Two days into Wimbledon I was extremely surprised and thrilled to know that Ivanisevic was playing in the championships on a wild card . By that point Ivanisevic had almost retired with a recurring shoulder injury. If a slump in form and fitness wasn't enough his father's heart problem and sister's cancer diagnosis pushed him to the edge. Ranked 125 in the world , his final attempt at glory was a

2017 Australian Open is done and dusted. Roger Federer is once again the Australian Open Champion standing tall at the end of it all. The news headlines have been talking all week about what a great comeback this is from Federer. While I agreed with them, I couldn't help but go back in time to remember the comeback of comebacks . Yes, back in the day there was a comeback made by a man who was all but forgotten. He was a fighter, a champion and a hero for all seasons . He was Goran Ivanisevic . Goran Ivanisevic I hadn't started watching tennis yet when Goran Ivanisevic (Pronounced as ee-wan-is-a-witch ) burst onto the tennis scene as a precocious teenager. The year was 1990 and Goran stamped his presence on the Wimbledon Championships when he gave three time Wimbledon Champion, Boris Becker a real scare in the semis . The next time we heard about Goran was in the 1992 Wimbledon Championships. I had only just started watching tennis in 1992 but little did I know t