Sports commentator Pradeep Magazine in Hindustan Times.
Is Sania Mirza’s ‘No’ to India the anguished cry of a young, successful, talented player to her nation to please let her live and breathe?
She is 21. She is a woman. She is a Muslim. And by any yardstick, one of India’s most successful international sportsperson. She plays a sport, which unlike cricket, is played all over the world. In that sport she is ranked 29th and the next best ranked Indian in the world could be a man ranked anywhere between 300 and 10,000!
And one day she screams at the top of her voice that she doesn’t want to play in India. Oh, Why?
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In The Indian Express, Viren Rasquinha, a former captain of India’s national hockey team, on tennis star Sania Mirza’s decision to skip Indian tournament.
If the news that Sania Mirza is seriously contemplating to skip the Bangalore Open and maybe all future tournaments in India were to be true, it would be a tragedy for Indian sport. I say tragedy because let’s face the facts. Besides cricket, sport in India has very few genuine stars and household names. And Sania is not just a star, her appeal far transcends that. She is a role model and an icon to millions of little girls in a country where women sports stars can be counted on the fingertips of one hand.
Expectations of her have very often been unrealistically high and sometimes she is expected to pulverise every opponent into submission, even if it happens to be one of the Williams sisters across the net. But more than that I really feel sorry for her, because at times her national commitment has been questioned and she has been strangled by the religious issues surrounding her attire and endorsements.
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She says she’s tired of being dragged into trivial controversies, reports The Telegraph, Calcutta.
Sania Mirza, whose attitude, attire and aggression came to symbolise the emergence of a new India, will not play in her country this year because of recurring controversies off the court. “People are criticising me for either the length of my skirt or appearance in ads or for insulting the national flag. Do I have to prove my patriotism again and again?” the 21-year-old tennis player asked in Hyderabad. The first casualty of the announcement is next month’s Bangalore Open. The Williams sisters – Sania won a billion hearts after losing to Serena in an Australian Open match full of verve in 2005 – are slated to play in Bangalore.
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The blizzard of off-court controversies into which Sania Mirza has been dragged cannot lay her low, writes her uncle Maseeh Rahman in the Indian Express
“Come on. Keep fighting!” For a while on Show Court 3 at the Australian Open on Thursday, it seemed as if Sania Mirza was going to buckle under the pressure and surrender. After winning the first set 6-1 in her typically aggressive style, her game had faltered, and she looked pensive as she submitted 4-6 in the second. Now she was down 1-3 in the decider, and her Swiss-Hungarian opponent Timea Bacsinszky threatened to run away with the match.
The exhortation from the players’ box had come from her father, Imran Mirza, and it had sounded like part instruction, part encouragement. Like many Indian families, the Mirzas are extremely close-knit, and Imran has played a pivotal role in Sania’s emergence as a world-class tennis player. I still remember my surprise when, visiting her house in Hyderabad many years ago, I discovered that Imran and his wife Naseema were about to set off for Thiruvanthapuram in their beat-up Maruti Esteem so that Sania could participate in a tennis tournament. They couldn’t afford to fly.
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