Looking at 2025, Sport: After an eventful last year, a period of lull ahead

It was a leap year where the heart kept leaping up into the mouth. Joy and heartbreak, the two emotions that define sport, were like sly muggers in dark alleys, trained to catch their victims off-guard.

What could have prepared India for that dreadful morning of August 13 during the Paris Olympics? Just the night before, Vinesh Phogat had taken out a GOAT wrestler, and what remained was the formality of writing the last page of her fairytale.

And then the weighing scale showed that she was 100 grams overweight. She was mercilessly pushed out of the competition and thrown into a dark pit of depression. A shell-shocked India didn’t know how to react.

At the same Olympics, the world thought Neeraj Chopra’s competition would be the javelin throwers from Europe. Little did they know that a Jat boy from Mian Channu, a village in Pakistan’s Punjab, would hurl the javelin with the nonchalance of a father lobbing a ball to his child at a park, and come up with a 90-plus throw to win gold.

Not just agony, even ecstasy came unannounced.

At the T20 World Cup final, all seemed lost for India – that old ICC event jinx seemed to have struck again. South Africa, meanwhile, had all but shed their choker tag. But Hardik Pandya bowled his redemption over, and then Suryakumar Yadav took a catch that will always be his calling card. Unimaginable, unpredictable, unbelievable – commentators had run out of the ‘un’ words.

2024 was also said to be about super athletes calling it a day but those grand farewells too seemed to have been postponed for next year. The aging legends Novak Djokovic, M S Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma – none of them spoke about retirement, fully or partly. Djokovic got an Olympic medal, Kohli and Rohit lifted the ICC Trophy, and Dhoni hit a few signature slog-over sixes. They all proved the sporting soothsayers wrong.

xxx

Being fully aware of the risk that comes with making sporting predictions and getting them horribly wrong, but remaining true to the tradition of dispensing year-ending/ beginning prophecies, here’s how sports and sporting careers are likely to unfold in 2025.

Compared to the eventful last 12 months, 2025 will be a period of relative sporting lull. After the leap, this is the landing year. 2024 had the Olympics, Euro football, World Championship chess, and the T20 World Cup. The frugal tournament list for the next 12 months can’t match last year’s magnitude or scale.

CRICKET: Of course, in February, there is cricket’s Champions Trophy, a tournament that was to be fully hosted by Pakistan but because of India’s refusal to cross the border will now have some games in Dubai. Pakistan is offended with the change, and in case the final too moves to Dubai – the understanding is in case India reach the title clash, it will – the least popular format will lose more fans.

VIRAT, ROHIT, AND? The big hope for the long neglected 50-over ICC tourney to hit the headlines could lie with happenings beyond the action on the field.

If India’s two aging greats, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, both in their late 30s and also on their last legs, don’t hang up their boots after the Australia tour and are out of the World Test Championship, the Champions Trophy could be where they will be expected to say their last goodbyes.

Retired from T20Is, struggling in Tests, the ODI World Cup in 2027 – Virat and Rohit have been running out of reasons to keep turning up for India games and delay the transition.

These likely departures this year will be followed by a succession drama. Who will be India’s Test captain? The BCCI, the selectors, the coach, and Indian cricket’s other influential voices – their say in such important matters never defined or made known to the world – will take this all-important call.

Since these Test captaincy aspirants will be in leading roles for the franchise teams, the IPL will be watched with interest.

But does the handling of your team’s resources in T20 cricket provide any clue about your Test leadership credentials? In India, it does. If Gautam Gambhir got the job of India coach within days of him taking KKR to the IPL title, the criteria couldn’t be too different when it comes to picking a captain.

Rishabh Pant, Shubman Gill, and K L Rahul wouldn’t do their Test captaincy chances any harm by winning the IPL, though Bumrah could also be in contention following his showing as captain in the Perth Test in November.

HOCKEY: Indian hockey will also be watching its own franchise format tournament, the Hockey India League, for international gains. Although there have been two short-lived attempts earlier, 2025 encourages us to say that this is an idea whose time has come now.

The Paris Olympics showed that Indian hockey has finally hit consistency. A second successive bronze at the Summer Games means India has the resources and the system to produce quality players. The spine of the team is young, and on the fringe are several 20-somethings with promise.

The HIL will bring foreign coaches, international stars, and new ideas. They would have money and also fame – Indian hockey has never had it so good since its run of gold medals.

CHESS: Chess too, is in the same happy space, if not better. If the year gone by was about India dominating the classical format with D Gukesh, 2025 will see “Vishy Anand’s children” flexing their blitz and rapid muscles.

Such is India’s talent in every format that wherever chess is played, Indians will be among the favourites. R Praggnanandhaa

and Arjun Erigaisi will continue to bring India glory. Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal – both individual gold medallists for India at the Chess Olympiad – also have the talent to be household names in 2025.

BADMINTON: Chess threatens to take the place that badminton had in the Indian sporting landscape.

Denied a medal at the highest stage, there wouldn’t be another shuttler as driven as Lakshya Sen to make a point at All England. Only a win can cure such disappointments, and Birmingham is where the Paris score can be righted.

Satwik-Chirag too will be keen to take a crack at the All England, though it might not be the ultimate priority. P V Sindhu has slid down the rankings over the past few years, but the only title missing from her collection – and the one that matters – is the All England.

There will be plenty of curiosity over which of the young women’s singles brigade steps up in this year – there is added spice with Sindhu having declared in Lucknow recently that she has no plans to make life easy for any Indian woman trying to defeat her.

NEERAJ, VINESH: In athletics, Neeraj Chopra will return to his gold-medal venue, Tokyo, for the 2025 World Championships in September.

Olympic champion Arshad Nadeem has left Neeraj with no choice but to crank up his distance to 90+ metres, and with a new coach in Jan Zelezny, making up for the lost Olympic gold and crossing the 90+ barrier will be his priority.

There’s also some suspense about Vinesh Phogat. Having won the Haryana Assembly election, she is likely to hit the gym and head for the mat in the months ahead.

If 2024 was about the big battles, 2025 could be mostly about war veterans retiring and war-room planning.