Big reputations lie in tatters
In the Sunday Guardian , Dileep Premachandran writes that India's batting greats should bow out like Nasser Hussain, who scored a century in his final Test and timed his retirement perfectly, and not like Kapil Dev and Javed Mianded, who played on
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
In the Sunday Guardian, Dileep Premachandran writes that India's batting greats should bow out like Nasser Hussain, who scored a century in his final Test and timed his retirement perfectly, and not like Kapil Dev and Javed Mianded, who played on for longer than they should have.
Regardless of where the big three go from here – and let's hope it's not down the Kapil-Miandad route – Indian fans would do well to eviscerate these two tours from memory. For more than a decade, these same men made a country proud, taking Indian cricket to heights it had never scaled before. This ignominious end shouldn't obscure that.
In one of the greatest sports pieces ever written, Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford said this of Johnny Unitas, the Baltimore Colts quarterback who was also a boyhood hero. "Ultimately, you see, what he conveyed to his teammates and to Baltimore and to a wider world was the utter faith that he could do it. He could make it work. Somehow, he could win. He would win. It almost didn't matter when he actually couldn't. The point was that with Johnny U, it always seemed possible. You so very seldom get that, even with the best of them. Johnny U's talents were his own. The belief he gave us was his gift."
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo