This has been an excellent week to be an Indian sports fan. While India recorded their best-ever medal tally at the Asian Para Games, Youth Olympics gave India a lot of hope. In the Asian Para Games, India bagged as many as 72 medals, which is more than double of their count from the 2014 Asian Para Games at Incheon. Similarly, at the Youth Olympics, the future stars showed a sneak peak to India’s reserves as the contingent, so far, has secured as many as 8 medals with four golds. On the football field, India had a chance to showcase their worth against China, who is 21-places higher than the 97th spot India currently occupies on the FIFA rankings chart and they lived up to the hype as the visitors managed to hold China onto a goalless draw - a result that will provide Stephen Constantine’s team a huge morale boost while playing in the away conditions. While India shone in conventional sports, golfer Shubhankar Dey forced many to wake up from slumber as he was in the joint lead after 54 holes for the second time in a PGA Tour event at the TPC Kuala Lumpur West course. That also means Sharma will play in the lead group of a PGA Tournament for only the second time in his career. It is also the second time at the CIMB Classic that an Indian player has had at least a share of the lead after 54 holes. Anirban Lahiri was the leader by four shots after three days in 2015 when Justin Thomas came from behind to win the title.

Australian cricket team's peril has always provided a lot of Indians their daily dose of schadenfreude. From being the most dominant and offensively bold team force in the sport to being annihilated by many to the bans imposed on their two of the talismanic characters, Australian cricket has been on a downhill ride for quite a while now. The team has been in tatters and needed a moment of their own to bring back the imagination of the fans, which eventually came to fruition last week as Australia made a great escape to draw the game from a position when only one result was possible - a Pak win. And on that count, the eventual result of the first Test between Pakistan and Australia was a great advertisement for Test cricket and why it is still the parameter of a player’s success. With Usman Khawaja and Tim Paine, Australia found two heroes as they helped the team survive four sessions against a strong Pakistan bowling attack in the fourth innings. Khawaja stayed on the crease more than 300 balls for his 141 and was supported by first Travis Head, who got 72 off 175 and then Paine, who got 61 off 194. Under sweltering Dubai heat, none gave a chance to Australia to produce such performance, but they ended up showcasing one of the finest displays in Test cricket. 

In what has come as a huge setback for the national team ahead of next month’s Hockey World Cup, India’s one of the finest strikers SV Sunil has been all but ruled out of the tournament after suffering a knee injury during the national camp in Bhubaneswar. He will now require four to five weeks to recover from the injury, which means he is out of contention for the World Cup to be held from November 28 to December 16. While it is not going to be helpful for the team at all, who has a major image rebuilding to do post the Asian Games debacle, the reason of the injury also points the finger towards the lack of foresight. The Kalinga Stadium, that will host the World Cup, has undergone a major change and the state government has turned that into a state-of-the-art facility at the centre of which is a newly-laid turf. But holding a national camp on turf like that was always going to be a risky affair as the new turf takes its own sweet time to settle. So, was it management’s fault or not can be viewed in both ways, but his absence is going to hurt India big-time.

In the Asia Cup, Shardul Thakur complained of right hip and groin soreness after the game against Hong Kong and was thus replaced by Siddarth Kaul. It was a fair call, but 9 days after that, he was seen representing Mumbai in a Vijay Hazare Trophy game against Punjab in Bengaluru. If someone can be fit enough to play a representational game within a week of the injury is suspicious, but BCCI could have been more proactive in their approach and asked him to take some rest when you have a top performer in the form of Mohammed Siraj. Instead, they took the punt of playing him in the second Test in place of Mohammed Shami and as things stand now, Thakur did not take the field for the rest of the day, after having walked off in the morning due to a pain in the groin region. When Thakur landed his front foot on the bowling crease, it seemed to buckle and follow-through was not possible. Could it not have been managed better? Well, we may never get the answer.