India-born left-arm fast bowler Jay Mundra made a memorable start to his international career and became the second player for Ireland to take a wicket with the first ball of his T20 career.Playing his first international match against India in Belfast on Friday, Mundra hit a four off the first ball of his spell in the second over of India’s innings. His victim was Sanju Samson, who was bowled after pulling the ball back onto his stumps in an attempt to force the ball through the off side.Mundra joined Matthew Humphreys as the only Ireland bowlers to take a wicket with the first ball of their T20 career.Wicket on the first ball of T20 career for Ireland
Matthew Humphreys
Jai Mundra.
The 29-year-old was making his T20I debut after being handed his first international cap by Ireland for the opening game of the series at the Civil Service Cricket Club.Born in Tonk, Rajasthan, Mundra moved to Ireland in 2021 to pursue a master’s degree in electronics and communications. After settling in the country, he joined Leinster Cricket Club in Dublin and worked his way up into Ireland’s domestic cricket system.Interestingly, Mundra did not start out as a fast bowler. He started his cricket journey as a batsman who also bowled left-arm spin before later switching to pace.Earlier in the day, India captain Shreyas Iyer won the toss and decided to field first.India’s fast bowlers kept Ireland’s batsmen under pressure with disciplined bowling and restricted the host team to 182 runs for nine wickets. Harshit Rana was the best bowler with 3 wickets for 24 runs.Ireland captain Lorcan Tucker fought back, scoring 50 runs in 36 balls, but he did not get enough support from the other batsmen.Despite expectations before the match, India did not give a chance to teenage batsman Vaibhav Suryavanshi to debut.
There was a lot of anticipation. More than a fortnight after the 15-year-old was selected in India’s T20 squad, hopes were rising that June 26 would be the day Vaibhav Suryavanshi would create history. It was widely speculated that he would become the youngest cricketer to receive an India cap in Belfast, breaking Sachin Tendulkar’s 37-year-old record. live update | Achievement:
However, the Indian team delayed the debut of Vaibhav Suryavanshi. Newly appointed captain Shreyas Iyer confirmed that Kishore had not found a place in the playing eleven for the opening T20I of the series in Belfast.
When Shreyas was asked about the decision, he said that the team management wanted to support the senior players who were part of India’s T20 World Cup-winning team. Incidentally, this is India’s first T20I after winning the World Cup in March.
“Unfortunately not. He is a gun player. But, we have experience in the team. And the seniors have done brilliantly in the last few series for India. So, we are backing most of them who have performed absolutely amazing. So, I think they will get a chance when the time comes. But, for now, we are going with three genuine seamers, one all-rounder and two spinners,” Iyer said.
Supporting the big call, former India batsman Sanjay Manjrekar said he was glad India resisted the temptation to include the 15-year-old in the XI, stressing that it would have been unfair to leave out either Sanju Samson or Abhishek Sharma.
“You can’t remove Abhishek Sharma after scoring 50 off 20 balls in the World Cup final. Samson went crazy during the World Cup. His last three scores were 93 not out, 89 and 89. So you can’t remove those guys just because we are excited about the young boys,” he told Sony Liv.
“India are doing the right thing and it is the right message. They have dropped the World Cup-winning key captain Suryakumar Yadav. So India are now focussing on cricketing merit, as it should always be. I am glad they have not got too carried away with the excitement of this young kid. He can wait for his turn, and he has time.”
India vs Ireland Live Score: India begin a new chapter in T20I cricket under captain Shreyas Iyer when they face injury-hit Ireland in the opener of the two-match series at the Civil Service Cricket Ground in Stormont on Friday.
While the reigning T20 World Cup champions start as favourites, much of the spotlight will be on young batting sensation Vaibhav Suryavanshi, who is on the verge of making his international debut.
Will Suryavanshi debut?
The 15-year-old has been the most talked about player in world cricket after a sensational IPL 2026 campaign with Rajasthan Royals. After this, he played a stormy innings of 94 runs in just 29 balls for India A in the final of the tri-series against Sri Lanka A in Dambulla.
Suryavanshi will become India’s youngest male international cricketer when he makes his debut against Ireland. However, it is not easy to fit him in the playing eleven.
India already have a settled top order. Abhishek Sharma and Sanju Samson formed a successful opening pair during the T20 World Cup, while Ishan Kishan impressed at No. 3. The team management will have to decide whether to alter the winning combination to accommodate the teenage talent.
A new era under the leadership of Shreyas Iyer
The series also marks Iyer’s return to India’s T20I squad for the first time since December 2023 and his first appointment as full-time captain after replacing Suryakumar Yadav.
Fresh from a successful IPL season as captain, Iyer will be looking to bring the same aggressive approach to the national team under head coach Gautam Gambhir. India are expected to field a strong middle order with Iyer, Kishan and vice-captain Tilak Verma.
Call for selection in bowling attack
India has to take decisions with the ball also.
The management will have to decide whether to bring Harshit Rana straight back into the eleven after his return to fitness or continue with fast bowler Arshdeep Singh along with Prince Yadav and Prasidh Krishna, who have been performing recently.
Ireland struggling with injury crisis
Ireland are entering the series with several key players unavailable.
The host team will be without experienced players like Paul Sterling, Mark Adair and Josh Little due to injuries. Newly appointed T20I captain Lorcan Tucker will lead a weakened side, with uncapped bowlers Matthew Hollard and Jay Mundhra earning call-ups for the first time.
India’s dominance record
History is strongly in India’s favor. The Men in Blue have won all eight T20 matches they have played against Ireland and last met them during the 2024 T20 World Cup.
India have also been performing brilliantly in this format and have won 12 of their 14 T20 matches this year. They will also play an international match at Stormont for the first time since 2007.
matching details
Match: India vs Ireland, 1st T20I
Date: Friday, June 26
Time: 6:00 PM IST
Venue: Civil Service Cricket Ground, Stormont, Belfast
Live broadcast: Sony Sports Ten 1 SD & HD and Sony Sports Ten 5 SD & HD
Your phone buzzes. A high-definition vertical video rolls down your feed, set to a bass-heavy Anirudh track. A 15-year-old kid with a helmet three sizes too big effortlessly steps inside a 145 clicks thunderbolt and deposits it into the second tier of an IPL stadium. Within thirty seconds, you’ve dissected his wrist-work, liked the post, and decided exactly where he fits in the pantheon of Indian greats.
Before Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has even earned his senior cap, likely in Ireland later today, he has already been algorithmically mapped, memeified, and consumed by millions. By the time he makes his international debut, there is nothing left to discover. His rise has unfolded entirely in a public cloud.
Which raises a rather surreal question: If this is how we discover our geniuses today, how on earth did India discover Sachin Tendulkar in 1989?
For anyone under thirty, teenage Sachin is essentially family folklore. We didn’t discover him through an algorithm; we inherited him from our fathers, who leaned back in their chairs to recite the gospel of a bloodied nose in Sialkot and four legendary sixes against Abdul Qadir in Peshawar.
We treat those grainy, endlessly recycled clips as Sachin’s definitive origin story, none more famous than that iconic, slightly awkward BBC interview where a curly-haired teenager softly explains his game to Tom Alter.
Except, they weren’t.
By the time Tendulkar walked out for his Test debut in Karachi, India wasn’t discovering a teenager; they were unveiling a deity. Long before anyone pointed a heavy television camera at him, fans knew his name, journalists queued at his school gates, and purists travelled across state lines just to watch a child bat.
Today, seeing is the absolute prerequisite for believing. We demand visual proof in milliseconds. But in the mid-1980s, India had no glowing glass rectangles. You couldn’t stream Azad Maidan or track a schoolboy’s strike rate on an app.
Instead, a simple four-word sentence travelled across the country like high-grade espionage: “There is a boy.”
It was murmured on the parched maidans of Bombay, debated over gin and tonics at the Cricket Club of India, and typed out in smoky newsrooms. Without a single fibre-optic cable, the story travelled. An entire nation had to assemble Sachin Tendulkar in their minds, constructing a prodigy out of cold newspaper typography, crackling radio commentary, and the sheer weight of word of mouth.
If you were born too late to breathe that era in, or if the digital noise has made you forget, let us take you back. This is how Indian cricket fell completely, hopelessly in love with a myth built on whispers instead of wireless data.
THE CRADLE OF CREDIBILITY
Ask four journalists from different parts of the country when they first heard the name Sachin Tendulkar and a remarkable pattern emerges. None of them begin with Pakistan. None of them begin with Tom Alter. None of them begin with Abdul Qadir. They begin with Bombay.
Rajdeep Sardesai’s memory takes him back to the Cricket Club of India. He had not yet become one of India’s best-known television journalists. He was a young cricketer, son of a legendary cricketer, spending time around a club that had become one of Bombay cricket’s meeting points.
“Well, I first heard of Sachin Tendulkar when he was about 13 or 14, playing school cricket,” Sardesai recalls.
“A friend at the Cricket Club of India mentioned that he had seen what he felt was the next big thing in Indian cricket.”
Notice the certainty. Not a promising youngster. Not a talented schoolboy. The next big thing.
The excitement spread quickly through Bombay’s cricket circles. Sardesai remembers signing a petition at the Cricket Club of India requesting that the rules be relaxed so Sachin, despite his age, could become a playing member.
“At the age of 13 or 14, he was already seen as the next big thing,” he says.
“I think this was around the time, or soon after, he was scoring all those hundreds, or shambars as we call them in Mumbai cricket, for Sharadashram Vidyamandir.”
Pause there for a moment and consider the audacity of that reputation. Sachin had not played first-class cricket. He had not represented India. Most people outside Bombay had never watched him bat. Yet conversations around him had become serious enough for one of India’s most prestigious, starch-collared cricket clubs to consider changing its own rules for a child who should have been at home doing his homework. That tells you something about the teenager. It tells you even more about Bombay.
The temptation today is to assume Sachin remained a provincial Bombay secret until Pakistan. He didn’t.
That is where the recollection of senior cricket journalist R. Kaushik becomes so valuable. Long before he went on to cover more than a 100 Test matches, Kaushik was just a student in Coimbatore. He had no afternoons at Azad Maidan, no conversations at the CCI, and no chance of watching Sharadashram Vidyamandir. Yet Sachin’s reputation had already arrived on his doorstep without the help of a single fibre-optic cable.
“Growing up, he was always a phenomenon,” Kaushik says.
“When he was 13 or 14, he and Vinod Kambli had that big partnership in school cricket. Once that happened, and also unlike now, Bombay was pretty much the cradle of Indian cricket. The Bombay cricket pundits and the Bombay media built up their players tremendously. You had no option but to hear about Tendulkar.”
The wording is revealing: You had no option but to hear about Tendulkar. Not because somebody was aggressively promoting him, but because Bombay cricket carried extraordinary, institutional credibility.
“So even though I was studying in Coimbatore,” Kaushik continues, “everybody knew who Tendulkar was long before he made his India debut.”
When asked whether that awareness was limited to hardcore cricket followers, he shakes his head.
“No, not at all. Anybody with even a basic interest in cricket knew who he was. You didn’t have to be obsessed with cricket.”
Pakistan, then, wasn’t India’s introduction to Sachin Tendulkar. It was merely television’s.
THE VIRAL ANALOGUE NETWORK
If Kaushik establishes that the stories travelled, Vikrant Gupta explains how.
“There was no social media. There were no news channels. Nothing,” he says.
“But you had newspapers, and in those days word of mouth travelled. Whatever came out of Bombay, the entire country came to know about it.”
For anyone raised entirely on algorithms, that sounds almost impossible. How could stories about one schoolboy go viral across India without a single clip on your timeline? The answer lies in an India that consumes cricket very differently.
“Today’s fan watches; the fan of the late 1980s read. They devoured publications voraciously: Sportstar, Sportsweek, Cricket Samrat. Newspapers carried full Ranji Trophy scoreboards. County Championship reports found space every morning. Radio commentary drifted out of paan shops, tea stalls, and rickshaws,” Vikrant says.
“We probably knew more about domestic cricket then than people know today.
“If you sat in a rickshaw, commentary would be playing. You walked through a market and a shop would have commentary on with people gathered outside.”
India Today magazine cover from 1992 (Courtesy: india Today Archives)
Cricket moved differently. It lingered. A remarkable innings became tomorrow morning’s headline, then an afternoon conversation, then a recommendation passed from one former cricketer to another. Bombay wasn’t merely producing players; it was producing reputations. And no reputation travelled faster than Sachin Tendulkar’s.
The whispers needed proof. They got it one summer afternoon in 1988.
Today, you and I remember the Harris Shield partnership between Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli as a cold, static number. Mention “664” to anyone who follows Indian cricket, and they know exactly what it refers to. But the number has completely overshadowed the cultural story.
The partnership did far more than create a record. It turned Bombay’s whispers into India’s conversation.
Two teenagers from Sharadashram Vidyamandir batted through an entire day against St Xavier’s in the Harris Shield. Wickets simply stopped falling. Bowlers disappeared into exhaustion. By the time stumps were drawn, Tendulkar was unbeaten on 326 and Kambli on 349. Together they had put on 664 runs, a partnership that became the stuff of cricketing folklore.
If that happened today, every boundary from that innings would have found its way onto social media within minutes. Back then, every run became an oral history. The newspapers did the rest. For Kaushik, sitting hundreds of kilometres away in Chennai, that innings became impossible to ignore.
“Once that happened, everybody started talking about him,” he recalls.
The Harris Shield didn’t introduce Sachin to Bombay; it introduced Bombay’s Sachin to the rest of India.
THE PIED PIPER OF THE MAIDANS
Sachin Tendulkar made his India debut in 1989 (India Today Photo)
Rajdeep Sardesai remembers just how inevitable Tendulkar’s rise already felt by then.
“Well, Sachin Tendulkar was a schoolboy sensation, and certainly everyone who followed cricket in Mumbai, which is the home of cricket, knew about Sachin Tendulkar. There was this schoolboy prodigy who was poised for great things.”
He believes that was the first stage of Sachin’s rise.
“I think Sachin Tendulkar was first a Mumbai cricket star because he became such a prolific scorer in Mumbai school cricket. The rest of the country came to know of him when he made his first-class Ranji debut and then, of course, he was picked for India at the age of 16.”
That distinction matters. Sachin did not become famous overnight. He graduated from a neighbourhood sensation to a city phenomenon, and finally to a national curiosity. Every single step happened before Pakistan.
Vikrant Gupta believes Bombay itself was the catalyst.
“Bombay was pretty much the centre of Indian cricket,” he says.
“The former players, selectors, journalists, everybody was there.”
He paints a picture that feels almost impossible to recreate today. The day’s cricket would end, but the conversations wouldn’t. Former India cricketers gathered at the Wankhede or the Cricket Club of India over tea. Coaches discussed promising youngsters, journalists swapped notes, and administrators listened. If one respected voice endorsed a teenager, the story travelled quickly through cricket’s tightly knit circles.
This was Indian cricket’s information network before the internet. It wasn’t driven by algorithms; it was driven entirely by credibility. If Bombay’s cricket fraternity said there was a prodigy worth watching, people listened.
No one understood that ecosystem better than the players growing up within it.
Naz remembers another vignette, perhaps even more revealing of the era. The day after scoring a century on his Ranji Trophy debut for Bombay, Sachin did not spend the next morning celebrating. He went back to school to play for Sharadashram in a school match. The crowd, however, was no longer a school crowd.
“I heard this from Amol Muzumdar, Sairaj Bahutule and others who were there,” Naz says.
“The whole ground was packed. He hadn’t even played for India yet, but people just came to watch Sachin.”
Think about that image. A school match, no television coverage, no social media promotion, and no broadcaster asking fans to turn up. Just pure word of mouth. Naz smiles when he recalls the phrase Amol Muzumdar once used for the teenager.
“He was the Pied Piper of cricket.”
Wherever Sachin went, people followed. Not because they had watched him on a screen, but because they had heard enough to believe they were about to witness someone extraordinary.
THE NEW DAWN
When did Sachin Tendulkar become a household name? (India Today Photo)
By the time Sachin made his Ranji Trophy debut for Bombay against Gujarat in December 1988, the anticipation had become impossible to escape. Rajdeep Sardesai had joined The Times of India as a young reporter barely a month earlier. He desperately wanted to watch the teenager everyone had been talking about . “The Times of India office wasn’t too far from the Wankhede,” he recalls.
“I requested my editor to give me the afternoon off. He reluctantly agreed.”
It wasn’t an assignment; it was pure curiosity. For nearly three years, Bombay had insisted there was a once-in-a-generation cricketer growing up in its maidans. Sardesai simply wanted to know if the city had exaggerated. It hadn’t. Sachin scored a century on debut. Sardesai rushed back to the newsroom convinced he had seen something remarkable.
“I came back to the office and told Darryl D’Monte, my editor, that I’d seen a new dawn in Indian cricket. I asked if I could write about it.”
The piece became Sardesai’s first front-page byline.
“I may not have got many of my political predictions right,” he says with a laugh, “but I certainly got that cricket prediction right. Sachin Tendulkar was going to be very, very special.”
Perhaps that is the most remarkable part of the story. The Ranji hundred did not create the hype; it justified everything Bombay had been saying for years. By then, the sentence had travelled almost everywhere. There is a boy. The rest of India was finally beginning to believe it.
The stories, however, still needed one final examination. No school tournament, no Ranji Trophy match, and no glowing recommendation from Bombay’s cricket establishment could answer the question everyone was really asking. Could a 16-year-old survive international cricket?
In November 1989, India finally found out. The tour to Pakistan has since become one of the most replayed chapters in Indian cricket history. Every generation has watched the same archive footage: the teenager adjusting his floppy hat, the Tom Alter interview, Waqar Younis striking him on the face in Sialkot, the blood trickling down his nose, and the over against Abdul Qadir in the Peshawar exhibition game.
For millions of younger fans, those moments are where the Sachin story begins. Rajdeep Sardesai remembers watching them unfold in real time.
“I think most of the country saw Sachin Tendulkar play for the first time on TV when India went to Pakistan in 1989,” he says. “That’s when we saw him on black-and-white television playing the likes of Imran Khan, Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram.”
He pauses when he reaches the image almost everyone remembers.
“I remember when he was hit on the head. Most people thought, ‘What’s going to happen to this 16-year-old?’ Guess what? He got up and went on to play a great innings.”
Then came Peshawar. The exhibition match. Abdul Qadir. The teenager dancing down the wicket against one of the world’s finest leg-spinners.
TWO DIFFERENT ERAS
It is impossible to disagree, but perhaps arrival isn’t quite the right word. Pakistan introduced Sachin Tendulkar to television audiences; it did not introduce Sachin Tendulkar to India. That had happened much earlier.
It is a tale of two entirely different civilisations.
Vaibhav belongs to an era of instant gratification, where every boundary is clipped for a vertical feed and every milestone becomes a push notification. Sachin belonged to an analogue India that traded in patience: a country that had to construct its heroes entirely in the mind, building a prodigy out of cold newspaper typography, crackling radio commentary, and pure, unadulterated word of mouth.
When a 16-year-old Tendulkar finally walked out to bat in Karachi in November 1989, India wasn’t meeting a stranger. It was finally putting a face to a myth. And perhaps that is the most extraordinary part of his rise: the rumour had already conquered a nation, but the boy still managed to exceed it.
All because of four whispered words that changed Indian cricket forever:
Ind A vs SL A: India A will resume in a strong position at 333/4 on the second day of the first unofficial Test against Sri Lanka A at the Galle International Stadium. After dominating the opening day with the help of Sai Sudarshan’s brilliant century, the visiting team will try to make a big score in the first innings and strengthen their hold on the match.
day 1 recap
India A ended the first day at 333/4 in 86 overs, with Sai Sudarshan laying the foundation for an impressive score with a brilliant century. After the top order did its job, captain Dhruv Jurel (57)* and Sheikh Rashid (48)* frustrated the hosts with an unbeaten 98-run partnership that ensured India A finished the day on a strong note.
For Sri Lanka A, left-arm spinner Dilam Sudira got the first breakthrough by dismissing opener Ayush Pandey (25) but the hosts struggled to get going as India’s middle order batted with discipline and composure.
day 2 outlook
India A will aim to take advantage of their strong position by taking the Jurel-Rashid partnership past 100 runs in the morning session. With plenty of batting still left, the visitors will be eyeing a score of over 500 in the first innings before ramping up their bowling attack.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka A is in dire need of early wickets to prevent India A from scoring huge scores. The first hour with the relatively new ball could prove crucial if the hosts are to make a comeback in the contest.
pitch report
It is expected that the surface at the Galle International Stadium will be favorable for batting during the opening session of the second day, which will provide good pace and carry. However, as the match progresses and the footprints become more pronounced, the pitch is likely to assist the spinners with more turn and variable bounce, making batting progressively more challenging later in the game.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup has officially become the most-attended tournament in history, surpassing the record held when the United States last hosted the competition in 1994. However, the milestone comes amid growing criticism over rising ticket prices, visa restrictions and organizational issues that have plagued parts of the tournament.
FIFA confirmed the new record during this periodGermany’s Group E clash with Ecuador at MetLife Stadium, Where after the first 56 matches the attendance crossed 3,605,357. This beat the previous figure of 3.587 million viewers set in USA 1994.
While the tournament has grown from 52 matches in 1994 to 104 this year, the appetite for football has remained constant. Stadiums are on average more than 99 percent full, and with 48 matches still to be played, the final attendance figure is expected to exceed four million.
For weeks, the World Cup has been subject to criticism away from the pitch, yet the atmosphere inside the stadium rarely reflects that negativity. Despite the noise outside the grounds, fans have continued to pack venues and turn every major event into a spectacle.
The historic feat was achieved in front of a crowd of more than 80,000 in New Jersey as Ecuador stunned Germany to reach the knockout stages. Earlier in the tournament, on 16 June, a one-day attendance record was also set with over 281,000 fans attending four matches across the three host nations.
but questions remain
The record attendance has done little to assuage concerns surrounding the tournament.
FIFA’s dynamic pricing model sent ticket prices for many high-profile matches skyrocketing into the thousands of dollars, leaving many traditional supporters priced out. At the same time, strict US visa policies and travel restrictions reportedly affected fans from many countries, particularly Africa and the Middle East, who struggled to obtain permission to attend.
Rising hotel prices discouraged tourists from extending their stay, causing many host cities to fall short of the expected boom in tourism.
Vaibhav Suryavanshi may be on the verge of becoming India’s youngest international cricketer, but batting coach Sitanshu Kotak made it clear that the teenager should not get his chance at the expense of a player who is already performing well.India begin their two-match T20I series against Ireland on Friday and if Suryavanshi is selected in the playing XI, the 15-year-old will become the youngest player to represent India. The team management led by captain Shreyas Iyer and head coach Gautam Gambhir faces a selection call before the opener. One option could be to bring Suryavanshi into the team in place of Abhishek Sharma and open with Sanju Samson or vice versa.Speaking on the eve of the match, Kotak praised Kishore’s ability but said that team selection should also be fair to players who are already scoring runs.“Vaibhav is very talented, there is no doubt about that. And the way he has batted in the IPL and all the other games, needless to say he has a lot of natural abilities. Because in the IPL he has faced Joffra, a lot of fast bowlers, a lot of experienced bowlers. And it seems like nothing is troubling him. So he is clearly an extraordinary talent,” Kotak was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.“This evening, the captain and the head coach will decide about the team. And if he plays well, even if he doesn’t play for me, it is great because he is part of the Indian team. And I am sure he will get his dues and his chances. So I don’t think just to give him a chance, we should drop someone who is already scoring runs.“That also wouldn’t be right. I think there’s a very thin line between trying to give someone a chance and you being unfair to another player,” Kotak said.Kotak said that the depth of talent in Indian cricket has made selection increasingly difficult and admitted that the job of selectors is also difficult.“If you ask me, there is so much talent in India that even the selectors have a headache. To be honest, I don’t have that big a headache because I am not the head coach and captain. But sometimes it’s hard.”“But one thing we also have to remember is that the guys who are already performing should never be ignored, I believe. The guys who are already scoring, winning games for the team.” bcciWhen Kotak was asked how difficult it was to keep players out of the World Cup-winning team, he said, “The structure is such that players will keep coming.”
Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann has hinted that Antonio Rudiger is in line for more minutes against Ecuador after impressing from the bench in the win over Ivory Coast. With Nico Schlotterbach ruled out of the tournament through injury, Rudiger is expected to play a bigger role as Germany look to finish the group stage with a perfect record. Nagelsmann also indicated that there would be only minor changes to his starting XI, while supersub Dennis Undav said he was happy to continue making an impact from the bench if needed.
Germany’s Antonio Rudiger during training. (Image: Reuters)
Pakistan’s batsman Gul Firuza (Photo courtesy: ICC)
Pakistan batsman Gul Firozha has been issued an official reprimand and given one demerit point after being found guilty of a Level 1 breach of the ICC Code of Conduct during the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2026 Group A match against Australia on Tuesday.Firozha was found to have breached Article 2.2 of the ICC Code of Conduct for Players and Player Support Personnel, which relates to the misuse of cricket equipment or clothing, ground equipment or fixtures and fittings during an international match.The incident occurred in the second over of Pakistan’s innings when Firozha, who was visibly disappointed at her dismissal, aggressively threw her bat and gloves in the direction of the team’s dugout.Since this was his first offense within a 24-month period, one demerit point was added to his disciplinary record. Firozha pleaded guilty and accepted the sanction proposed by match referee Michel Pereira of the Emirates ICC International Panel of Match Referees, avoiding the need for a formal hearing.This allegation was made by on-field umpires Sue Redfern and Vrinda Rathi, third umpire Jacqueline Williams and fourth umpire Shathira Zakir JC. Under ICC rules, Level 1 breaches carry a minimum penalty of an official reprimand and a fine of up to 50 per cent of a player’s match fee along with demerit points.
Pakistan’s frustration has increased due to heavy defeat
The disciplinary setback came during a tough encounter for Pakistan, who suffered a heavy 113-run defeat to Australia, leaving them without a win in the tournament after four matches.Pakistan captain Fatima Sana admitted that her team had one of its worst performances in the competition and urged her team to reflect honestly ahead of their final group game against the Netherlands.“I think we played our worst cricket in this game and as a whole team we need to accept that. We need to go back, reflect and improve ourselves,” Sana said after the match.Despite the result, Sana highlighted some positives from the bowling unit, particularly the efforts of Nashra Sandhu and Sadia Iqbal, who took two wickets each while keeping Australia’s batting in check for a while.“I think our bowling was very good, especially the way we started. Nashra and Saadia bowled really well… we need more players to support them,” he said.With Pakistan already out of the competition, their final Group A match against the Netherlands now becomes an opportunity to restore glory and end the disappointing campaign on a positive note.
The first reflects the number of days it took for Neymar Jr. to return to international football with Brazil. The second shows the number of days Lewis Hamilton endured without a Formula One win before ending his drought.
Different sports, different journeys, but united by a familiar theme – resilience in the face of setbacks.
Soon after returning in Brazil colors at the FIFA World Cup 2026, Neymar Shared a picture of himself from the match against Scotland on social media with a simple caption: “Remember who you are”. This was the same phrase Hamilton posted after ending his winning streak and claiming victory at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.
It seems champions speak the same language.
For most of the last decade, Neymar was expected to inherit the football throne from Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Instead, his career was defined by recurring injuries that repeatedly hampered his momentum in key moments.
Every time he looked ready to take center stage again, he was followed by another blow.
Ultimately injuries changed the direction of his career. They took him away from European football to Saudi Arabia and later back to Brazil. Over the past three years, Neymar has missed more than 100 matches in club and international football, with major tournaments and decisive moments left on the sidelines for long periods of time.
Neymar celebrates after Brazil qualified for the knockout stage of the FIFA World Cup 2026 (Photo Reuters)
After 981 days away from the Seleção, Neymar finally returned to the national team and Brazil secured a comfortable 3–0 victory to qualify for the knockout stage of the ongoing World Cup.
It was a comeback that wasn’t guaranteed just a short time ago.
The returns also came amidst fresh investigation. A few days earlier, the Brazilian president had mocked the forward by questioning his prolonged absence due to injury concerns, describing him as a “footballer who works from home”.
Neymar’s reaction was particularly understated.
Instead of engaging in a war of words, he let his work behind the scenes take center stage. The boots were back on, the yellow shirt was back on his shoulders, and after almost three years away, Neymar was once again representing Brazil on the international stage.
It remains to be seen whether this is the beginning of a final chapter or the beginning of a continued revival. But for now, Neymar is adopting the same message that helped motivate Hamilton during the toughest period of his career:
