There was a time when a cricketer could become important to you without you knowing much about him at all. You knew how he batted, how he bowled, how he celebrated, maybe even the way he walked back to the dressing room after getting out, but that was about it. You didn’t know what he had for breakfast, what music he listened to, who he was dating, what his house looked like or what he had posted on Instagram at two in the morning. You just watched him play cricket. Somehow, that was enough. Then things slowly changed.
Players became easier to find, easier to follow and easier to know, and I think somewhere in all that extra access, the relationship between a fan and a cricketer changed too. I can’t really explain when it happened or what exactly disappeared. I just know that something did. We still have superstars. We still have players who can fill a stadium and make millions of people stop whatever they are doing to watch them. But the way we admire them feels different now. Maybe because there is very little left to imagine. You don’t just know the cricketer anymore. You know the person, the brand, the family, the holidays, the Instagram posts and sometimes even what he had for breakfast. And perhaps a little bit of the magic was always in not knowing.
Think about Sachin Tendulkar for a moment. For millions of people, he wasn’t just a batsman who scored a ridiculous number of runs. He somehow became part of birthdays, school holidays, family arguments and that feeling that if India were batting, you could probably stay awake a little longer. The same thing happened with Rahul Dravid, Brian Lara, Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, Kumar Sangakkara, MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, AB de Villiers and so many others.
Their greatness is there in the numbers, obviously, but honestly, who remembers the numbers first? You don’t remember Tendulkar just because he scored 100 international centuries. You remember where you were when he got out. You remember the noise in the house when he reached a hundred. You remember your father shouting at the television. You remember arguing with your friends about whether Lara was better. You remember Kohli‘s chase against Pakistan, Dhoni‘s six in the 2011 World Cup final, Warne‘s ball to Gatting, or some completely meaningless league match that nobody else would remember but somehow stayed in your head for years.
That’s probably the strangest thing about sporting heroes. You watch them for years and, without even realising it, they become part of your own life. So when you remember them, you end up remembering where you were, who you were with and what life was like at the time too.
There is something else worth admitting when we talk about those older heroes. All the names I’ve used are men, and I’m not writing that because I think women cricketers back then lacked the talent to become huge stars. They clearly didn’t. The problem was that women’s cricket simply didn’t have the audience, television coverage or infrastructure to turn that talent into the kind of stardom men enjoyed. Even if a woman cricketer was brilliant, she wasn’t going to fill a stadium in those days the way the biggest male players could.
Cinema had a similar problem. An actress could be extremely talented, but getting people into a theatre often depended on how the film presented her. Give her a memorable role, a few scenes designed to grab the audience, maybe a song or two, and suddenly she became a bigger part of the attraction. Male actors, meanwhile, could often sell the film simply by having their name on the poster. I’m not saying this because I’m worried someone will call me a misogynist. I’m writing about the misogyny that existed in the world I’m talking about. There’s a difference.
Things have changed, thankfully. Women’s cricket now has players who can fill entire stadiums on their own and become the main attraction rather than an addition to someone else’s show. And I’m mentioning all this because the players I’ve used as examples throughout this piece are almost entirely men. That is partly because of the era I grew up watching, and partly because of who the cricketing world gave the biggest stage to back then.
But here is where I start getting confused. When does a good cricketer actually become your cricketer? Is it after the first hundred? After the first big performance? Is it because he wins something? Or is it simply because you have watched him for long enough that his face starts appearing in your memories without permission? I don’t think there is a proper answer.
Sometimes the player you get attached to isn’t even the greatest of his generation. You might remember a guy who scored 3,000 Test runs more fondly than someone who scored 15,000. You might have a favourite bowler with 150 wickets because he happened to be around during a certain part of your childhood, while someone with 500 wickets somehow feels like a stranger.
Stats can tell you who was great. They can’t tell you who mattered to you. That part is decided by memory. And that’s probably why cricket can have so many great players but only a few people end up becoming heroes.
The funny thing is that heroes used to have a little mystery around them. You saw them on television, read about them in newspapers and magazines, collected pictures and maybe caught an interview after a big series. Then they disappeared. That was it. You had to wait for the next match. And I think that gap mattered more than we realised.
If Tendulkar didn’t play for two weeks, you actually missed him. If Warne wasn’t in the next Test, you waited for him to come back. There weren’t fifteen clips of them on your phone before breakfast telling you what they were doing that morning. You simply didn’t know. And because you didn’t know, your imagination filled in the blanks. They existed mostly through cricket, so the cricket itself carried much more weight.
Now a cricketer can be everywhere without even playing a match. You see the interviews, podcasts, training clips, brand ads, dressing-room videos, press conferences, Instagram posts and whatever else turns up on your feed. Sometimes you even get people analysing his body language because he liked someone’s post six months ago. We have so much access to these players now that I sometimes wonder if we’ve taken away a little of the mystery that made them feel special in the first place.
It isn’t necessarily their fault. Modern players probably don’t have much choice anyway. Cricket has become such a huge entertainment industry that players are expected to be athletes, celebrities, content creators, interview subjects, brand ambassadors and, occasionally, unpaid therapists for fans having a terrible week.
Every match gives us a ridiculous number of clips now. One bad innings and suddenly everyone has a theory about the batter. Maybe his technique is finished. Maybe he can’t handle pressure. Maybe he shouldn’t be batting there. Maybe his strike rate is a problem. Somehow, one dismissal can turn into a full autopsy of his career. Then he scores 120 a few weeks later and everyone acts like they never said any of it.
The internet has made the distance between a cricketer making a mistake and people judging his entire career almost nonexistent. And I think that changes how heroes are made. You need some time for a player to grow into that role. You need to watch him fail, disappear for a while, come back, do something remarkable and slowly become bigger than the bad days.
Look at how differently we experience young players now. A kid, like Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, scores a hundred in his third international and, within an hour, his best shots are all over the internet. Then come the comparisons with legends, childhood stats, old interviews with his coach and some graphic telling us he’s going to be the future of Indian cricket. Then he plays the next match and scores 11. Suddenly people are asking if all the hype was a bit too much. He gets 4 in the next one and now the same people are wondering if he’s already been found out.
The funny part is that this is happening before the player has even had time to figure out international cricket himself. Sometimes I think we’ve become too impatient with young players. A kid has one good innings and we’re already talking about what he could become. Then he fails a couple of times and people start questioning whether he belongs at all. Maybe we’ve forgotten that careers are supposed to take time. You’re meant to watch a player grow, have bad days, disappear for a while, come back and surprise you. Now we seem to want the ending before the story has even got going.
And maybe that is why the older heroes feel almost impossible to replace. They had time to become part of people’s lives. Tendulkar wasn’t just Tendulkar because he became famous at 16. He stayed around for so long that different generations grew up watching him. Someone could have been five when they watched one of his great innings and thirty when he played his last Test. That’s a huge chunk of a person’s life.
Dhoni had his own version of it. He arrived with that long hair and those ridiculous sixes, became captain, won the T20 World Cup, the 2011 World Cup and the Champions Trophy, walked away from international cricket and but somehow stayed just as massive through the IPL. Kohli has had a different journey again, from that angry young guy we weren’t sure would last this long to one of the defining batsmen and personalities of his generation.
These players didn’t become heroes because of one great moment. They kept giving people moments to remember. And after watching someone for that many years, it becomes pretty hard for the next player to simply walk in and take their place.
There’s another uncomfortable part of this, though. Sometimes we kill our own heroes. Not literally, obviously. We just get very good at cutting them down to size. A player can spend ten years becoming someone we love, and then one bad season is enough for people to start asking whether he was ever that good in the first place. A career that lasted fifteen years gets judged by the last six months. Decline becomes something embarrassing instead of something that was always going to happen.
You see it all the time. The same player who once made you believe a match was never over suddenly becomes a burden. The captain whose decisions you celebrated for years is now someone who should have retired earlier. The batsman whose hundreds you waited for is getting mocked because he made 30. We want our heroes to stay exactly as we remember them, at the age when we first fell in love with them. The problem is that the man wearing the jersey doesn’t stop getting older just because our memory has stopped there.
That might be the saddest part of all this. A cricketer can spend twenty years giving us memories, and then we start getting annoyed at him for reminding us that those twenty years are gone. When Sachin retired, it wasn’t just his career ending. For a lot of people, it felt like a small part of their own life had ended with it. Dhoni stepping away from international cricket felt strange for the same reason. He had been there for so much of our cricket-watching life, and suddenly he wasn’t part of international cricket anymore.
Whenever Kohli eventually reaches the final chapter of his career, there will be people who feel something similar. It won’t really be about the runs or the records. It’ll be about realising that a person who was simply there for so many years is suddenly no longer going to be there.
Statistics can’t really explain that. A retirement announcement might take three paragraphs, but what actually ends is much bigger than that. Someone who had become part of your routine quietly disappears from it.
And perhaps that’s why I don’t completely agree when people say modern cricket has no heroes. It does. They’re just harder to hold on to now. There’s too much cricket, too much information and too much access. A player can play for India on Monday, fly to another country on Tuesday, appear in an IPL campaign on Wednesday and be trending on Thursday because of something he said in an interview. By Friday, someone has dug up a five-year-old clip and decided it tells us everything about him.
We don’t really get those gaps anymore. There’s always something new to see, some new opinion about the player, some new reason to talk about him. And maybe that matters more than we realise. You need to miss someone a little before you understand how much space they occupy in your life.
So when I talk about the strange death of the cricketing hero, I’m not saying great cricketers have disappeared. They haven’t. Cricket will keep giving us players who make us jump out of our chairs, bowlers who can change a game in three balls and captains who give us arguments we’ll still be having ten years later.
What I think we’re losing is something more personal. There used to be a little distance between you and the player. You watched him play, read about him, and then you went back to your own life. That distance gave your imagination somewhere to work. But now we know too much now. We see too much. We judge too quickly. And before w’ve even had enough time to miss someone, there’s already another player, match, story waiting to take their place.
And maybe I’ve been blaming cricket for something that actually has very little to do with cricket. Maybe the players haven’t changed as much as I think. Maybe I have.
When I was younger, a cricketer could take up a ridiculous amount of space in my head simply because there wasn’t much else there fighting for my attention. You waited for the match. You waited for the newspaper the next morning. You waited for the next series. That waiting made the player feel bigger somehow.
Now there’s just too much fighting for our attention. Cricket itself has become a constant stream, and before one player has had enough time to really stay in your head, something else comes along and takes his place. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The heroes of my childhood had time to become important to me. Today, everything moves so quickly that sometimes a player barely gets the chance.
Maybe that is the real strange death of the cricketing hero. He doesn’t disappear when the cricketer retires, and he doesn’t disappear just because someone better comes along. Sometimes he disappears because we grow out of the person who once needed him to be a hero.
You get older. Childhood becomes adulthood, the television becomes the phone, and the afternoon match becomes something you check between other things. The player who once felt larger than life slowly becomes another name in an archive of scores and statistics.
And then, years later, you come across an old clip. He’s batting. The crowd is making that noise you remember. You recognise the shirt, the stadium, maybe even the way he used to walk between the balls. And for a few seconds, you’re back there again. You remember exactly who you were when you watched him.
The hero hasn’t really come back.
You have.
Also READ: Ollie Robinson’s extraordinary summer of redemption with England in 2026
Amar Pal Singh Bhalla is a sports writer covering cricket, football and tennis.
Based in India, he has followed the game for the last few years and writes
match analysis, previews and features for Beyond The Score
