I am a die hard cricket fan, Period.

Whenever Sachin Tendulkar hits that straight drive or Zaheer Khan clean bolds opponent, my heart skips a beat while I cheer for Team India. That’s a usual story for 80 percent of our cricket fanatic country, including me.

However, when ace shooter and bronze medalists Gagan Narang, Mary Kom (Boxer), Saina Nehwal (Badminton), Yogeshwar Dutt (Wrestling) and Silver medalists Sushil Kumar (Wrestling) and Vijay Kumar (Shooting) won those medals for India at the just concluded London Olympics 2012, I felt good, because all these players, despite of their ‘hidden’ sporting career full of struggle, be it financial, social as well as political, they cracked the medals and dedicated those to the nation that is already swallowed by Cricket.

They practiced having the fact in mind that no one even knew who they were (well a few who watch news and take interest in sport now know who they are). They walked down the stadium holding the National flag, when they knew that the majority of us would be watching the India-Sri Lanka series, and asking for updates of Olympics on Twitter.

You would easily see thousands of sport-experts criticizing the performance of Indian athletes this Olympics, who would say that they are too disappointed, feeling down, ashamed and even laughing. But these are the same genre who didn’t even know who Mary Kom or Sushil Kumar was before they bagged the coveted medals.

Spare the names of sports; we don’t even know how many sports we were competing for in this Olympic. But on the other hand we keep following even the personal lives of cricket players.

The Government on the other side announced cash and goodies for winners – so kind of them. The same government won’t realize that giving Rs.1 crore to an individual would be nice, but the nicer thing would be to provide additional facilities and training packages to budding players who are preparing for such International events – so that we don’t have to come empty handed next time.

The Indian Football team is yet waiting to qualify for the World Cup while the Hockey Team came home watching their foot-nails, and we don’t even know who else lost, other than who all won. India sent a total of 83 athletes to compete in 13 sports at London Olympics ’12. Do you even know what sports they were! (Don’t Google them now!).

I have no intention to hurt the soft-spongy-mushy Cricket corner of the heart, but I think Sports in India need more respect attention and concern apart from the glorious Cricket saga.

After all, cricketers too have made their way from nick, worked hard to prove to get that attention of us – that’s fair. But what seems to be unfair is that we are blind to other sports.

We want them to win Gold, but how is it possible without providing any facility to mold them to be able to fetch that Gold.

And, for the sake of humanity at least stop criticizing athletes for their performance, as for if you can’t cheer for them, you have no right to criticize them.