All posts tagged: savour

No Jasprit Bumrah, snappy Gautam Gambhir: Why India’s Champions Trophy win is special and one to savour

No Jasprit Bumrah, snappy Gautam Gambhir: Why India’s Champions Trophy win is special and one to savour

Published by Parlour News

Played five, won five. Convincingly. That’s India’s report card from the Champions Trophy, a tournament they won for an unprecedented third time in Dubai on Sunday. India’s players celebrate with the trophy after winning the ICC Champions Trophy final against New Zealand in Dubai(HT_PRINT) There can’t be any one title sweeter than the others – this was India’s seventh crown – because how can you play favourites when it comes to something like this? Each one is special in its own way. What makes this special is the circumstances under which it was achieved. The Rohit Sharma–Gautam Gambhir management era had gotten off to a rocky start in Sri Lanka in August, with a 0-2 loss in a three-match One-Day International series. It went from the expected (a 2-0 defeat of Bangladesh in home Tests) to monumentally disastrous (an unparallelled 0-3 drubbing at home by New Zealand) and teetered on the edge of the precipice after a 1-3 loss to Australia in a five-Test series, towards the end of which the skipper sat himself out …

Savour the retiring Tai Tzu Ying and Ratchanok Intanon, Badminton’s Federers | Badminton News

Published by Parlour News

Tai Tzu Ying and Ratchanok Intanon will compete in their fourth Olympics at Paris. But it is to their infinite and enduring credit that two of the most elegant and exciting shuttlers of the last decade, have made badminton in intervening years between the Games, enchanting. The big medals might have moved from one boxed and structured game of Carolina Marin to Chen Yufei to perhaps Paris favourite An Se Young next. But for pulling in badminton watchers week after week, season after season and elevating women’s singles to breathless tear-streaking gleeful art, you needn’t look beyond TTY and Ratchanok. India’s former international Aparna Popat reckons this is a summer to savour the last of their brilliance, and be silently grateful for having witnessed them in action. This will be as big a set of retirements as Roger Federer’s, and Federer was indeed the TTY and Ratchanok of tennis – in how they get imprinted on the mind, not just the names engraved on trophies. That badminton had two artists, zephyrs on a hot sticky …

Ghosts of 66 and 81 linger, yet India’s Cape Town conquest is a win to savour | Cricket

Published by Webster

Pundits and laymen alike were convinced that this was India’s moment, that never before were South Africa so ripe for the picking. Despite three batters on their first tour of South Africa, India boasted plenty of experience in the batting group. Even without Mohammed Shami, there was loads of bowling firepower with Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj in the forefront. By contrast, South Africa’s batting was undercooked, the bowling by and large bereft of exposure to the rigours of Test cricket. If not now, then when? Rohit Sharma is elated as Shreyas Iyer hits the winning runs to give India their first-ever Test win in Cape Town.(PTI) A maiden series triumph bubble was burst in 210 overs and less than three days in Centurion when the lack of back-up for Bumrah and Siraj was mercilessly exposed by Dean Elgar and Marco Jansen. Once South Africa amassed 408 in response to India’s 245 in what were decidedly bowler-friendly conditions, only one team was in the hunt and Rohit Sharma‘s aspirations of becoming the first Indian captain …