Indian cricketers’ wives face ban after team’s thrashing on tour

The BCCI has continued its finger-pointing following India’s Border-Gavaskar Trophy loss to Australia, with wives, girlfriends and children set to be prohibited from future tours because they are a distraction to its Test stars.

Indian star Virat Kolhi and his wife Anushka Sharma at the SCG.

Touring Australia can be arduous, with baying fans and hostile fast bowling, not to mention the many temptations for young men spending a long time away from home.

It is little wonder, then, that most teams are now allowed to have their wives and girlfriends by their sides - if for no other reason than to save on phone bills. As the Times cricket correspondent, Mike Atherton, remembered it, on the 1990 England tour of Australia the Northamptonshire batsman Wayne Larkins was so homesick he spent his pounds 20,000 tour fee on phoning his wife.

Times have changed, and on their recent Australia tour India’s team were often accompanied. But their 3-1 loss in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy has prompted soul-searching.

The consensus? It is the wives’ fault. The Board of Control for Cricket in India is now expected to limit the time spouses can be present.

The presence of wives, and in some cases children, on tours is seen as a distraction. The acronym WAGs cannot be applied to Indian cricket: the presence of girlfriends is largely not countenanced. This time the star player, Virat Kohli, was joined by his wife, the Bollywood actress Anushka Sharma; the bowler Jasprit Bumrah by Sanjana Ganesan; and the batsman KL Rahul by Athiya Shetty.

Anushka Sharma, wife of Virat Kohli, watches with other families of the Indian Test side.

The board has decided that wives will be allowed to travel with the players for no more than two weeks on tours lasting more than six weeks. On shorter tours wives may be limited to seven days.

Suresh Menon, an Indian sports writer, said the ban was “ridiculous”. He added: “When Kohli was dating Sharma, she accompanied him on a tour where he scored hardly any runs and [the board] and the media all blamed her. But in the next tournament he scored a century while she was with him, yet no one credited her for his good performance.”

The writer Binoo Johan suggested that the authorities feared sex might affect the players’ performance on the field, a belief that largely derives from Mahatma Gandhi’s pursuit of celibacy in his later years: “This kind of ban, which will probably be enforced unofficially, is based on a total myth - that if a player has sex the night before, it weakens his performance.”

THE TIMES