Sunday, April 02, 2006

Raina - The Hero… Give him a break

For the last three days the sports page of any newspaper Hindi or English has been carrying an expert opinion about Raina. It seems that newspapers don’t have anything else to cover; as if the sporting world has come to a standstill after Raina’s performance so that sports correspondents do not get bothered by any other petty events and can fully concentrate on analysing the performance of Raina from every possible angle (including the encouragement he got from his neighbours ten years back for playing cricket).
Raina today was being portrayed as a substitute to Tendulkar, while Tendulkar may be having a bad phase in his life and retirement may be imminent for him, we still can’t compare likes of Tendulkar to Raina. For heaven’s sake he is just a kid who did a wonderful job in one inning. If he continues to do so for coming year or two then we may think of comparing him with legends but as of now the idea is ridiculous not because he is not good but because he is too new for this.
The media tends to over-hype a single performance to an extent that the person simply buckles down under pressure of performing well (because media expects him to perform) and this is what is happening to Raina. The pressure on him has grown manifolds simply because of media, this is the punishment for playing good cricket. God forbid, if the same person performs badly in the next match then media will make sure that his career in cricketing is over even before he gets out of the stadium.
The need is to go easy on him and let the time decide his fate, not the media!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi pandey,
I appreciate ur ability to bring to notice the things which wud otherwise go unnoticed (or un-commented, to be more specific). Keep it going. Its good.

Anonymous said...

You got it right bro...If Indian fans are not enough, media even further makes or breaks a good cricketer in to hero or 0.

Raina like yuvraj in his early days hlds a lot of potential and definetely has what it takes to handle pressure at the international level but isnt it what is expected of a young cricketer?,
Comparing him with sachin would be the most wierd thing as far as cricketing world is concerned...

other day, gillespie made 201* against bangla desh, a feat which very few australian have been able to achieve, now does that graduates him to a level above Sir Don Bradman...
Well media for sure gets it completely wrong at times and if you want to see the heights of wierdness, go n turn on AAJ TAK, a channel that was criticising Viru for his poor run is supporting after hi yesterday's performance against pakistan and even claiming that other TV news channel and crtics wrote him off whereas they were the first one to come up with some wierd "Vishesh" on viru n kaif's poor form...

May GOD bless media.. and cricketers..