“You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through study of Gita” -Swami Vivekananda
No seriously, if by no other means than excessive fake injuries footballers are prone too. With Arena right around the corner, every athlete is putting in everything into training. This is especially true for all those whose new year resolution was to wake up early and go for a jog and fortunately are holding out a bit longer than those who resolved to attend the morning lectures.
Teams from across the country will be participating in the potpourri of sports with more zeal than we ever showed for our academics or perhaps ever will. We owe this fervour to origins of these sports where games were indeed a matter of life and death; some more than others. Colonialism and the world wars are the main reasons why our favourite sports are common these days. We can take this even further for our glorified national sport of hockey, which goes as far back as 1400BCE where they play hockey with skulls and the losing team was usually sacrificed to gods so that the sun kept moving. Thankfully nowadays a hockey game is slightly less serious.
Speaking of serious sports, racquet sports are the way the cookie crumbles. A tennis match is played like a war usually. John Isner and Nicholas Mahut (The 70-68 Wimbledon match) played 183 games over three days which is just insanity. Incidentally, the longest recorded tennis rally took 29 minutes in a 1984 women’s match. Of course, that doesn’t imply anything. Not really, it’s amazing that we now have women’s football and basketball teams because when our semester started they would only advertise the frisbee team to the girls.
Play hard, play harder.
Article by Abhimanyu Dasgupta.
The Journal Club 