Essay 34 · 5 min The Circus Manifesto: Play for the Joy, Not the Jackpot We told a whole generation to chase the IPL and the India cap, and forgot to tell them why the game is worth playing at all. On the four seconds no bank balance can buy, the take-it-easy and make-it-easy policies, the reset button, and why the greats of every sport treated the stage as the party they had been invited to. Essay 33 · 5 min In Defence of the Nightwatchman: A Tactic the Intent Era Retired Too Soon A number nine sent out to survive the last half-hour, and the groan from the stands that mistakes arithmetic for cowardice — on the gambit the modern game retired as a relic, from Gillespie’s double-hundred to Tudor’s unbeaten 99, and the thinking it discarded along with it. Essay 32 · 6 min The Six Inches Between Nets and the Middle The hardest journey in cricket is the shortest one — the walk from the nets to the middle, where the same technique and the same body suddenly belong to a different mind. On fear as a tax on the natural game, concentration as narrowing rather than straining, and why temperament is the most trainable part of a player and the least trained. Essay 31 · 6 min Two Tests Is Not a Series: On the Quiet Starving of the Long Tour India go to Sri Lanka for two Tests, win the first at Galle, and the contest is all but settled before it has begun to breathe — on why a series needs length to be a contest at all, and what the shrinking tour, and the two-tier logic behind it, is quietly costing the game. Essay 30 · 6 min Namma Guru Nathi: The Multi-Faceted Man Friday, the Aapath Bandhava Javagal Srinath turns 57 today. 157 km/h at Paarl, 236 Test wickets, 315 in ODIs, four World Cups — and the numbers still don’t tell half of it. On the Mysore Express’s pace, the pranks, the steel that held a dressing room straight through the match-fixing years, and the quiet devotion behind the stardom. Essay 29 · 4 min Suthar Doesn’t Compete. He Dominates. Six for 33 on debut against Afghanistan, ten for 131 in India’s 600th Test at Galle — and the mechanism behind the hype is older than the hype. On the wrist, the seam and the width of the crease, and the line of Bedi, Doshi, Goel and Raju that Manav Suthar has just walked into. Essay 28 · 6 min In Defence of the Draw: The Result Modern Cricket Taught Itself to Despise A game that now treats every stalemate as a failure has forgotten the fifth-day rearguard — Atherton at the Wanderers, du Plessis at Adelaide — where character, not the scoreboard, does the talking. On the honourable draw, and a points table that has quietly priced it out of the game. Essay 27 · 6 min To the Pitch of the Ball: The Lost Art of Playing Spin A generation raised in the T20 furnace was taught to hit spin, not to play it — and on a turning track, where survival is the currency and the feet are the answer, the difference shows in a single afternoon. Essay 26 · 5 min Three Balls, Three Examinations: The Case Against a Standard Test Cricket Ball The Dukes lost its shape all English summer and the old cry went up again for one ball to rule them all — but the Dukes, the SG and the Kookaburra are three different questions, and a game that has already flattened its pitches should think hard before it flattens its ball. Essay 25 · 6 min The Coin Is Not the Culprit: Why Cricket Should Keep the Toss England’s counties spent four summers handing the visiting captain the choice, then quietly gave the coin back — a reminder that the toss was never what rigged a Test. The doctored pitch was, and the honest fix is to police the surface, not abolish the ritual. Essay 24 · 7 min A Contest Decided by a Coin: The Case for Reforming Cricket’s Toss Skill should be rewarded and luck punished — yet on the days conditions decide everything, we still hand the single largest advantage in the game to the fall of a coin. On an abandoned county experiment that had the right idea, and why it deserves a second life. Essay 23 · 5 min Stop Wasting VVS Laxman on the Dugout: Make Him the Architect of Indian Cricket A master architect keeps being pulled off the blueprints to lay bricks. On the role India actually needs him for — Director of Cricket, above the head coach, the selectors and the boardroom — and the factory he should be building: birth-quarter audits, rolling development pools, a pipeline for support staff, and an independent Director in every state. Essay 22 · 6 min A Number One That Means Nothing: The Case Against the Bilateral T20 International England beat India 4–0 to be crowned the best T20I side in the world — a title that resets before the next World Cup, won in a series the calendar had half-forgotten before the trophy was handed over. On a format that has mislaid its reason to exist, and how to give it one back. Essay 21 · 6 min Reading the Pitch: Cricket’s Great Unspoken Art Two seasoned pros press a key into the strip, nod knowingly, and get it gloriously wrong. On moisture and clay, the batting captain’s seven minutes with the roller, why away decks are the true examination — and the case for finally coaching the one variable that decides matches. Essay 20 · 5 min Bazball: The Man Who Dared When Nobody Else Would Test cricket had gone safe, predictable, yawn-inducing — then Brendon McCullum asked why not have some fun. On Bazball’s place alongside Fosbury’s Flop, Cruyff’s Total Football and Curry’s threes: the ideas every establishment first called lunacy, then copied. Essay 19 · 8 min The Coaching Credential We Don’t Have: Why India’s Most Important Job Needs a Licence Football will not let you manage a top-flight club without a Pro Licence. Cricket hands its most scrutinised job to whoever had the best playing career. The case for a mandatory pathway — classroom, apprenticeship, certification — before anyone is given the Indian dressing room. Essay 18 · 6 min Stop Calling It Mankading: The Run-Out at the Non-Striker’s End Was Always Fair A dismissal as old and as lawful as any other, dressed up for nearly eighty years as a betrayal — and the plain truth the etiquette keeps hiding: the non-striker who steals a yard is the only one breaking faith. Essay 17 · 6 min The Weight of the Name: On Being a Cricketer’s Child and Choosing the Same Game A boy walks out to bat and the ground has already done the arithmetic — his father’s average, his father’s hundreds. On the hardest new-ball spell in cricket, which is not bowled by anyone, and how a famous son is meant to survive it. Essay 16 · 6 min Twelve Against Twelve: How the Impact Player Rule Is Quietly Killing the All-Rounder The most ingenious rule in franchise cricket carries one hidden cost — it makes the game’s hardest-won cricketer optional, and a furnace that no longer demands a second skill will stop forging men who have one. Essay 15 · 6 min At Home in the Discomfort: Why We Keep Failing in Alien Conditions Beaten in Belfast and chased down at Old Trafford — and a reminder that a domestic diet of flat pitches and short ropes raises cricketers who feel like tourists the moment the ball begins to move. Essay 14 · 5 min Picking What the Eye Misses: Ten Fixes for a Selection System That Keeps Failing Talent A single trial day, a gut call, an over-fished city — most junior selection is built to miss the late developer and the kid with no academy money. Here is how to rebuild it, mostly for free. Essay 13 · 18 min Forging Champions: Why the Window Is Shorter Than You Think Intensity, load, mental conditioning, and the uncomfortable truth about raising elite young athletes. Essay 12 · 6 min Intent Is a Tool, Not a Creed: What a Levelled Series Says About Aggressive Batting England revived Test cricket by attacking everything — and a patient New Zealand at The Oval was a reminder that the highest skill was never courage or caution, but knowing which ball to leave. Essay 11 · 6 min The Grind That Still Builds Them: Why the Ranji Trophy Matters in the Franchise Age A side with no pedigree dethrones a giant in Hubballi — and a reminder that the long, unwatched apprenticeship still makes the cricketers the auction only rents. Essay 10 · 6 min In Defence of Umpire’s Call: Why Cricket’s Most Hated Rule Is Right Two identical balls, two opposite verdicts — and a margin of doubt the technology cannot honestly close. A defence of the rule everyone loves to loathe. Essay 09 · 7 min Winning Was Not Enough: The Suryakumar Lesson and the Case for Building Captains A World Cup-winning captain removed in a hurry — and the system that has trusted to luck for fifty years and called it tradition. Essay 08 · 5 min The Quiet Partnership That Wins Matches: Why Coach and Captain Must Be as One Two different worlds — the dressing room and the middle — and the relationship between them that finally leads a cricket team. Essay 07 · 5 min Reading the Twenty-Two Yards: Why Even the Masters Get It Wrong The thumb in the soil, the knowing nod — and the educated guess beneath it. On the truest and most humbling art the game asks of anyone. Essay 06 · 5 min A Game of a Thousand Variables: Why Cricket Is the Hardest Sport to Master The pitch is alive, the weather rewrites the script, the ball decays — four opponents at once, and the genius of a game that refuses to be solved. Essay 05 · 5 min The Scorecard Does Not See Everything: Why Numbers Alone Cannot Judge a Cricketer Numbers measure outcomes; they are wretched at measuring context — and context is where cricket actually lives. Essay 04 · 5 min Leg Byes Reward Nobody — It Is Time to Take Them Out of Cricket Runs credited to a phantom column for a moment of pure failure. Abolish them, and let the dot ball off the pad be the bowler's. Essay 03 · 4 min The Free Hit Has Gone Too Far — Take Away the Runs Off a Wicket Ball One overstep, billed three times. Keep the batsman's reprieve — but strip the runs from a stroke that should have been a wicket. Essay 02 · 5 min Bringing the Fight Back: How to Make the IPL an Even Contest Again Complaining is the cheapest seat in the house. Here is the blueprint — pitches, boundaries, the ball and the rules. Essay 01 · 5 min When the Contest Goes Missing: Why IPL 2026 Left Me Cold Back-to-back titles for RCB, runs by the thousand — and a season that too often forgot the duel that makes cricket cricket.