Sport has never been bigger. Have we forgotten how to look?

It happened while listening to Mausam and Escape, one of the best and most brassy instrumental tracks from AR Rahman’s Oscar-winning score for Slumdog Millionaire. It had been years since I last put it on, but within seconds I was hooked again by the manic, electrifying strings of sitar maestro Asad Khan. True to form for someone who can’t enjoy anything without immediately checking what strangers think about it, I found myself scrolling through the YouTube comments section.

Amidst the usual fluff stood out a unique sentiment that had the kind of quiet depth that stops you mid-scroll: “I want to erase this tune from my mind just so I can listen to it again.”

It was a strange, almost desperate wish, yet it struck an immediate, resonant chord. Who among us does not have this exact desire? Wipe the brain slate clean somehow, purely to inherit the heady privilege of being blindsided by genius for the first time.

As the combination of sitar and electric guitar reached a crescendo, my brain did something strange. It completely skipped music and went straight to sports. Because isn’t that the one thing we all secretly want from a great sporting moment, to feel like it’s happening to us for the very first time?

Think Sachin Tendulkar in Sharjah, matching the apocalyptic energy of a real sandstorm, pulling India over the line. Think of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal trading tennis strokes like mythical gods in the fading light of the 2008 Wimbledon final. Think of Lionel Messi’s breathtaking World Cup final performance against France, Virat Kohli’s incredibly thoughtful MCG masterclass against Pakistan or Steve Smith’s gut-wrenching, blood-and-guts drama surviving against the terrifyingly hostile spell of Jofra Archer at Lord’s.

Imagine if we had that magical, neurological reset button. What if we could rid ourselves of hindsight, statistics, and the burden of history, only to watch these titans again, unaware of what will happen next?

This fantasy lasts exactly as long as someone disagrees with you. The ball has barely returned to the center circle, the noise has barely settled, before in an instant it stops being about what just happened and becomes about who turns out to be right and who turns out to be wrong. Greatness has a remarkably short half-life in the modern sports landscape before it aggressively transforms into ammunition.

AMMUNITION, NOT AWARDS

Messi vs Ronaldo debate turns ugly at World Cup (Reuters Photos)

Take the night Lionel Messi scored a World Cup hat-trick against Algeria, enough to equal Miroslav Klos as the tournament’s all-time top scorer. For a few hours it looked like the neatest thing in football: a man in the final act of his career still finding gear no one knew existed. Then came Wednesday and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal stumbled to a goalless draw with DR Congo, the big man himself finishing the evening without a single shot on target.

On American television, Thierry Henry, normally generous to both men, he said simply that the team needs to score, not Ronaldo. Chris Sutton went further and suggested on social media that Roberto Martinez was too scared of Ronaldo to replace him. Within minutes the conversation had ceased to be about Portugal’s toothless night and had instead become about who was still the greater of the two aging greats, as if one man’s flat performance was evidence of the other’s superiority in a rivalry that never overlapped on the pitch.

When asked about the state of this debate, former India men’s soccer coach Igor Stimac offered a reality check that cuts right to the psychological root of modern fandom.

“Some of it is toxic,” Stimac said.

“And it shouldn’t happen because these two players made football so special for all of us. Anyone who talks about them should first stand up and acknowledge what they have done for football. To be publicly harsh on one of them is too much. It says more about the people who make these comments than Ronaldo or Messi. They should look in the mirror.”

Cricket has its calmer version of the same affliction. Spend 10 minutes on any forum and you’ll find someone who will decide with great confidence whether Sachin Tendulkar’s genius trumps Ricky Ponting’s ruthlessness as the defining batter of their era together.

Rarely does anyone ask the more interesting question: how did it actually feel to witness each man’s batting? That doesn’t exactly fit the graphics.

A WAR NOT EVEN A MAN ASKED FOR

Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma (Photo Reuters)

The rivalry between Kohli and Rohit Sharma is made even uglier because it was made inside what was meant to be a dressing room. Somewhere along the way, the two men who spent over a decade rebuilding Indian batting became proxies in a tribal feud that had almost nothing to do with either of them. Every elegant boundary by Rohit or thoughtful chase by Kohli gets armed with fan pages and TV graphics that flash at each other with strike rates as if a single innings number can solve anything.

Press conferences have turned into a trap for this very reason, a question disguised as analysis but really just bait, an invitation for one player to pounce on another’s link. Neither man has ever shown even the slightest interest in taking it. It’s largely a fight we set up for them and then blame them for not dealing cleanly.

THREE KINGS, NO PEACE

The Big Three of men’s singles tennis (Photo Reuters)

If one example should kill the goat debate, it’s the golden era of tennis. The balletic grace of Roger Federer, the gladiatorial fury of Rafael Nadal and the relentless, almost mechanical precision of Novak Djokovic shared roughly two decades at the top of the sport, each redefining what the other two had to become in order to survive.

Three men, one era, an abundance unmatched by any other sport before or since.

Logically, it was meant to prove that there is no such thing as a chosen one, that greatness can simply co-exist. Instead, it multiplied wars. “Fedal” forums litigated one-handed backhands as religious doctrine. Entire accounts existed purely for reduce Djokovic’s claim despite the numbers ultimately falling in his favor.

Three careers is worth a fortune, and somehow we’ve made it more conflict, not less, which tells you the problem was never a lack of greatness to admire. It is quite possible that we will never see such a trio in any sport again

None of this is just a fan problem, and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Broadcasters built entire panel segments around forcing a verdict between two players who owed no one a comparison. Reputable publications have published a piece versus a piece because it travels further than an award piece, and most of us know this because they wrote both. Top 10 listings generate more clicks than pt.

We have normalized a culture where an athlete’s individual triumph cannot exist on its own without being immediately measured by someone else’s yardstick. We do it for ourselves, collectively, because comparison is simply easier than sitting with the discomfort of two extraordinary things existing at once without having to lose.

Comparison itself is not a disease. Sport has always measured itself against itself, and there is real pleasure in an argument offered with love rather than contempt. Illness stretches the scale before the miracle comes, allowing someone else’s career to become the only language left to describe one’s own.

The last three decades have given almost every sport its own golden generation. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Messi, Ronaldo, Schumacher, Hamilton, Mayweather, Pacquiao, Jordan, Curry. A glittering constellation of human perfection that comes at once.

And we just can’t stop them scoring against each other.

Somewhere this year, a 15-year-old in Indian colors will clear his front foot and hit a cricket ball so hard and so far that the stadium will catch its collective breath. The replay will keep repeating itself when it comes to the first comparison, someone is already deciding who he reminds us of, who he has to become, who he is not yet. Just for one ball, resist the urge to pull out your phone and check what strangers think about it. Watch it for what it really is. Nothing else. Just that.

– The end

Issued by:

Akshay Ramesh

Published on:

28 Jun 2026 14:45 IST