4 min readApr 12, 2026 08:51 AM IST
Chirag Shetty will be the last person to carp about cricket — he loves the sport, and doesn’t just watch it but plays it too. He’s a proper Mumbaikar that way. Most Indian top athletes adore cricket, feel elated as fans when the Indian Cricket Team wins, and know their IPL jargon. But does Mumbai, a global metropolis, respect Chirag Shetty — a former World No. 1, twice World Championship medallist, Asiad and Asian Championships title holder, and Thomas Cup champion in badminton?
News of Mumbai getting probably the biggest, largest, swankiest, cleverest cricket stadium to host over a lakh trickled out this week. That will be the city’s fifth cricket venue after Wankhede, Brabourne, DY Patil and BKC — only because all ICC finals keep getting allotted to Ahmedabad, and somebody let it slip that Wankhede was too small a capacity, despite it doing fairly alright all these years across all formats. So Mumbai gets dragged into the laughable competition of who has the biggest stadium.
Juxtapose that with the fact that India’s financial and glamour capital, with some of the richest citizens, the second-most important city in the country, has no world-class stadia for any of these sports — hockey, badminton, tennis, track and field, swimming, or a generic top-grade venue for gymnastics, TT, boxing, wrestling or any of the multipurpose arena sports.
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Thane’s Dadoji Konddev Stadium, which continues to have a massive crop of enthusiasts for athletics, has been encroached upon for IPL second-team training, with four lanes of the track being literally eaten up by cricket grass. The Andheri Sports Complex lies in disuse and is of no utility for international-level events. And Chirag Shetty, perhaps the city’s greatest international athlete currently, a certified No. 1, has no home stadium that can even dream of a Super 500 event while he’s at the peak of his career.
The city’s Anglo-Indian community base that nourished past Indian hockey teams has been allowed to erode. Cooperage is an apology of a football venue, though the sport deserves its space in South Mumbai, just as cricket and hockey do. The track and field talent from the Thane-Mumbra and Govandi belts has no stadium left to train at, and pushing sport further into Navi Mumbai is a sign of a deteriorating sports culture, as cricket saturates and then irritates the sportscape.
It was bad enough that private clubs and gymkhanas made sport inaccessible to many who actually played. The uber-rich had access to facilities in South Bombay but no intention to take up sport as a career. NSCI, CCI, Bombay Gymkhana can host state championships at best, or a Tata Open. But there’s nothing in Mumbai to host the world’s greatest shuttlers.
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Mumbai was never a single-sport city. It won’t forcibly morph into one either, just because a spectacular stadium rises someplace on the horizon. Even a North Stand regular at Wankhede — amongst the most fanatic of cricket supporters — would blanch at the prospect of the state capital turning into a cricket monochrome. True cricket fans always have a second love amongst Olympic sports, and are not insecure about crowding the whole city with cricket stadia and killing all other sports. Ask Sunil Gavaskar what badminton means to this city. Or Sachin Tendulkar.
Nobody hates cricket. But the resentment towards the mammoth sport builds when others are blatantly ignored, when their home city erases them from the sporting history of the land they call their own. Chirag Shetty won India the Thomas Cup in 2022, the team World Cup of badminton. It was as big as the 2011 50-over Cricket World Cup, in his sport. India doesn’t win World Cups that often — except in kabaddi — for everyone to simply forget about this one.
He will perhaps be the city’s only Asian Games-bound athlete, or one of a handful. But he doesn’t have a badminton arena, or a world-class multipurpose stadium that he could share with 20 other indoor sports, to call his home court while cricket stadia proliferate. Mumbai, the megapolis, looks incredibly small and limited and minimum when that gets spelled out.
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