What sets the Mumbai player apart?

Makarand Waingkankar, writing in the Times of India, explains why Mumbai remain virtually invincible in the domestic circuit. The trials and tribulations of daily life, he says, is a huge factor contributing to their mental toughness and the stubbornness that has characterised their approach to the game for many years.

Everyone who’s ever heard of train travails in Mumbai knows it’s a survival game in itself: you have to board the train in barely a few seconds even as hundreds are trying to get in; you have to jostle for leg room inside, where there is no place even to plant your feet; more importantly, you have to make sure you are not thrown out of the moving train by the rush of humanity. Prithvi, and many such kids, have to undergo this battle everyday, with a huge kit-bag in tow.

It’s this type of travelling that makes a Mumbai cricketer mentally tough. Vijay Merchant may have initiated the monsoon league to prepare the player for all the vagaries of weather and pitch; but even he wouldn’t understand the kind of impact it had on the psyche of the aspiring youngster. There are times when scores of boys start early in the morning, from far-flung Dahanu, Boisar or Kalyan, to play in the Kanga League; they leave in bright sunshine but by afternoon incessant rains bring the city to a halt and disrupt the train services too. The boys have to trek all the way back home... on foot.

Karnataka's Abhimanyu Mithun and Manish Pandey are the two players to watch out for in the years to come, says Satish Viswanathan in the same newspaper. But their rise is a study of contrasts.

Pandey’s career was chalked out more meticulously, as can be expected from an Army officer’s son. With the father always on the move, a permanent base was set up for the batsman in Bangalore, allowing unfettered devotion to the sport. Mithun’s success is more inadvertent, a chance step to train regularly in his father’s gymnasium leading to one thing after another. His father owned the place, was also the chief fitness instructor, and the first signs of a pacer were honed in the unlikeliest of places.

In fact it was barely three years ago, in 2007, that Mithun first got hold of a leather ball. "I used to play tennis-ball cricket and friends told me I was good. I joined a cricket camp and started bowling with the leather ball. I started enjoying the experience and then it all fell in place for me," says the unassuming 20-year-old.

In Outlook, Rohit Mahajan says India's domestic season needs a revamp. The trials of country-wide travel, the existence of some needless tournaments and the limited opportunities players have to prove themselves in the first-class game results in a waste of talent and saps the players.