SPORTS PAGE

I am a great fan of Nirmal Shekar (sports reporter the hindu). Here I would like to present a few of her great works -

A HERO GOES OUT IN HIS PATENTED STYLE
On Steve Waugh's retirement (just to remind you, his last test was against India and in his innings he played his trademark saviour innings)
...in walked the man. It was time to get into the trenches and do battle...one more time, one last time.
Waugh fights; therefore he is. Nothing better describes the Australian captain than what he does in the cauldron in an hour of crisis. The great man needed to come up with his signature tune at the death one more time.
Not another jaw-dropping work of genius, not another fantastic fairytale farewell innings of unmatchable beauty but merely a workmanlike 80 crafted with blood and sweat in the trenches by a working class boy from the Sydney suburb of Bankstown.
Man is not defined so much by success as he is by failure, by how he faces up to the possibility of failure, by how he deals with crisis, how he stretches his resources, both physical and mental, to turn failure, near-failure, into a glorious triumph.
This not only something that is character-revealing but-also, more significantly, a defining process that separates not merely boys from men but the men themselves from gladiators. And Steve Waugh is the greatest gladiator of his era in the world of cricket. No single cricketer in modern times could have faced up to failure and turned it into a triumph with quite the same gladiatorial intensity and single-mindedness, as has Steve Waugh time after time after time.
Sports is at once a fascinating laboratory for observations as well as a cruel business because the situations it creates strip a man to his essentials. There is nowhere to hide, nothing to cover yourself with.
The tighter the rope, the deeper the abyss, the colder the air, the greater the overall threat, the better it is for Waugh. Average challenges are for average people. Only the big ones inspire him.
Great warriors like nothing more than to fight equals and here, atlast, the most successful captain in Test history found a visiting team that had the skills and the determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with the champion and trade punches.