<b>Shekhar Gupta:</b> Back to a future we buried

Indian cricket has risen because of small-town, aggressive players who are superior to past stars

On the morning you wake up to election results, I am sneaking in to make some outrageous arguments, about cricket – I might as well do so when the India-Australia series is making the headlines for its controversies, and our cricket is being pushed back into its genteel, apologetic, offer-the-other-cheek, good-loser past.
 
The first argument: As long as our cricket was played by “decent, clubby, well brought-up” folk, it was about as good as Bangladesh’s. Second, as those generations of Oxbridge/Hindu-Stephen’s “good boys” and “graceful losers” yielded ground to small-town HMT (Hindi Medium Type) “bad boys”, it started rising.