4 min learnUp to date: Apr 12, 2026 06:23 PM IST
Chirag Shetty would be the final particular person to carp about cricket — he loves the game, and doesn’t simply watch it however performs it too. He’s a correct Mumbaikar that method. Most Indian high athletes adore cricket, really feel elated as followers when the Indian Cricket Crew wins, and know their IPL jargon. However does Mumbai, a worldwide metropolis, respect Chirag Shetty — a former World No. 1, twice World Championship medallist, Asiad and Asian Championships title holder, and Thomas Cup champion in badminton?
Information of Mumbai getting most likely the largest, largest, swankiest, cleverest cricket stadium to host over a lakh trickled out this week. That would be the metropolis’s fifth cricket venue after Wankhede, Brabourne, DY Patil and BKC — solely as a result of all ICC finals maintain getting allotted to Ahmedabad, and any individual let it slip that Wankhede was too small a capability, regardless of it doing pretty alright all these years throughout all codecs. So Mumbai will get dragged into the laughable competitors of who has the largest stadium.
Juxtapose that with the truth that India’s monetary and glamour capital, with a few of the richest residents, the second-most vital metropolis within the nation, has no world-class stadia for any of those sports activities — hockey, badminton, tennis, observe and discipline, swimming, or a generic top-grade venue for gymnastics, TT, boxing, wrestling or any of the multipurpose enviornment sports activities.
ALSO READ | From a locked room to the BAC last: How Ayush Shetty stopped holding again and defeated World No 1 Kunlavut
Thane’s Dadoji Konddev Stadium, which continues to have an enormous crop of fans for athletics, has been encroached upon for IPL second-team coaching, with 4 lanes of the observe being actually eaten up by cricket grass. The Andheri Sports activities Complicated lies in disuse and is of no utility for international-level occasions. And Chirag Shetty, maybe the town’s biggest worldwide athlete at the moment, an authorized No. 1, has no residence stadium that may even dream of a Tremendous 500 occasion whereas he’s on the peak of his profession.
Town’s Anglo-Indian group base that nourished previous Indian hockey groups has been allowed to erode. Cooperage is an apology of a soccer venue, although the game deserves its area in South Mumbai, simply as cricket and hockey do. The observe and discipline expertise from the Thane-Mumbra and Govandi belts has no stadium left to coach at, and pushing sport additional into Navi Mumbai is an indication of a deteriorating sports activities tradition, as cricket saturates after which irritates the sportscape.
It was unhealthy sufficient that non-public golf equipment and gymkhanas made sport inaccessible to many who really performed. The uber-rich had entry to services in South Bombay however no intention to take up sport as a profession. NSCI, CCI, Bombay Gymkhana can host state championships at greatest, or a Tata Open. However there’s nothing in Mumbai to host the world’s biggest shuttlers.
Story continues beneath this advert
Mumbai was by no means a single-sport metropolis. It received’t forcibly morph into one both, simply because a spectacular stadium rises someplace on the horizon. Even a North Stand common at Wankhede — amongst probably the most fanatic of cricket supporters — would blanch on the prospect of the state capital turning right into a cricket monochrome. True cricket followers at all times have a second love amongst Olympic sports activities, and aren’t insecure about crowding the entire metropolis with cricket stadia and killing all different sports activities. Ask Sunil Gavaskar what badminton means to this metropolis. Or Sachin Tendulkar.
No one hates cricket. However the resentment in direction of the mammoth sport builds when others are blatantly ignored, when their residence metropolis erases them from the sporting historical past of the land they name their very own. Chirag Shetty received India the Thomas Cup in 2022, the staff World Cup of badminton. It was as large because the 2011 50-over Cricket World Cup, in his sport. India doesn’t win World Cups that usually — besides in kabaddi — for everybody to easily overlook about this one.
He’ll maybe be the town’s solely Asian Video games-bound athlete, or one among a handful. However he doesn’t have a badminton enviornment, or a world-class multipurpose stadium that he might share with 20 different indoor sports activities, to name his residence courtroom whereas cricket stadia proliferate. Mumbai, the megapolis, seems extremely small and restricted and minimal when that will get spelled out.
© IE On-line Media Companies Pvt Ltd
