India won the cricket World Cup last year, but none of the players from that team has been nominated for the prestigious Arjuna Award because of major communication gap between BCCI and Sports Ministry of India.
BCCI did not send the nomination list of the players for the prestigious award before the deadline got over. BBCI has defended their actions saying that they did not receive the format required to file the list of nominees from the ministry.
Between the battles of two power houses, the Sports Ministry led by Ajay Maken and the BCCI who are at loggerheads since long, it is the cricketers who have suffered. The cricketers must be asking the question to themselves that if winning the World Cup wasn’t worth enough to get a nomination, then what else would they have to do to get the coveted honour.
Some will say that it is just a matter of year, but it is not as simple as it looks. To be eligible for the Award, a sportsperson should not only have had good performance consistently for the previous three years at the international level with excellence for the year for which the Award is recommended, but should also have shown qualities of leadership, sportsmanship and a sense of discipline. No player can guarantee that he/she will be able to replicate what they achieved this season. There are severe chances that some players who deserved a nomination, might have to wait for more than a year to get their name in contention again.
London Olympics is just round the corner and Indian players who will do well there will surely get nominated for the award next year and they deserve that, but there are some cricketers who deserved a place this season as well.
Let’s have a look at some of the Indian cricketers who deserved a nomination for the Arjuna Award, if not the award itself.
Virat Kohli: Kohli has been sensational for India since the time he was picked in the squad. His performance with the bat has been awesome and his one-day record is simply brilliant. In the 85 matches that he has played he has scored 11 hundreds and that is phenomenal. He was particularly severe on the bowlers last season. His World Cup performance was brilliant as he scored 282 very important runs for India. His career achieved severe heights after that and he played two of the best one-day innings of all time Australia and Bangladesh.
Yuvraj Singh: He was the man of the tournament in the World Cup and it was his all-round performance that won India the esteemed trophy. He played some magical innings and won India many matches with both bat and ball. Some players are made for big stage and Yuvraj surely fells in that category. He scored 362 runs in the tournament with an average of 90. With the ball he took 15 wickets and was the second highest wicket taker for India in the tournament.
Suresh Raina: Raina has been crucial member of the Indian squad from the past few years. He played all the matches for India in the World Cup and played a vital role in team India’s success. Raina’s name is not in the list of the top run-scorers but the only reason for that is that he bats too far down the order. His innings of 34 against Australia in the quarterfinals was very important. And it is not just about one good little innings, Raina has been contributing for the team from a long time and is a certainty in the Indian one-day and T20 squad.
It is not that the players who are nominated for the award do not deserve it, but it is unfair to the cricketers that their name was excluded from the list even after winning the biggest tournament of this sport.
By Indian Sports News Network
