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It looks as if the entire world is against him. First it began with some booing, bad form, ordinary captaincy for Mumbai Indians, which some of the former greats claim to have seen coming after the West Indies T20 series loss last year. But Hardik Pandya, who could do no wrong two seasons ago and everything he was touching with turning into gold, is putting up a brave front. In front of the public eye, he is taking it right on the chin and turning his sad moments into a big smile. Hardik is truly quite a sport. This world only means performance. Either you have it or don’t. If you don’t have it, they will blame you, despise you and say all kinds of things to shake your world of confidence.
The options are so limited when performances go down that even the best of fighters are prone to give up. But there are a few who are extraordinarily talented, almost thick-skinned, brave and still very involved to make it happen. Hardik falls in that category. He doesn’t mind people not thinking highly of him. Because he has enough self-respect to fight through this bad phase. When some are taking sadistic pleasure in measuring Hardik’s tough going in the IPL, and even depriving him of the credit he deserves in making Gujarat Titans a champion side two years ago. They claim that Ashish Nehra is the reason for Titans’ success but Hardik won’t mind it all. After all, everyone has the right to his opinion and you can’t really control the public backlash, can you?
Before judging Hardik so harshly, some of the arm-chair critics won’t even know how tough it is to captain a side like Mumbai Indians. Forget the over-involvement of the management, captaining a side as big as MI is actually a huge task. It is easy to blame the players but one has to see the other side of the story before drawing a conclusion. What can Hardik do if the Mumbai Indians offer him captaincy after taking it away from Rohit Sharma?
The fault lies completely with the Mumbai management and they are ones who have given birth to this unprecedented situation. It is almost embarrassing to believe that national selectors think Rohit is still a T20 captain material while the Mumbai management think otherwise. Three years ago, the same Mumbai management thought that Hardik is no good because he wasn’t 100 percent fit to bowl but after he scripted a success story for Gujarat Titans, Hardik was all of sudden better than Rohit. So, is Mumbai’s parameters to judge a player exactly accurate?
Former cricketer Sunil Gavaskar is absolutely appalled by Mumbai’s sloppy performance, but there is no point blaming Hardik for it. The Mumbai management created it all because they were desperate for their sixth IPL title. In that path of Mumbai’s desperation, isn’t the unity of the national side compromised by pitting one against the other?
Let’s not make Hardik a villain here. He is a smart man. In fact, Hardik is smarter than a lot of those who are questioning his credentials. Everyone knows the perform-or-perish theory and make no mistake that Hardik is a performer for India. He can soak pressure and is a natural athlete. Just because his emotional strength is being tested, it doesn’t mean that he is weak.
