‘Wicket lun din bhar, Awards jeetun raat bhar’ – Fans react as Mohammed Shami wins men’s best international cricketer award

India pacer Mohammed Shami has been awarded as the Best Men’s Cricketer of the Year by the Indian Cricket Board. The board distributed the awards for the last few years were due to the players. The last time India Men and Women cricketers were in 2018-19. Due to COVID-19 and other reasons, the players were not awarded for the next few seasons.

However, with the 2023-24 season in progress, the board has decided to award players, be it Men or Women. Talking about Men, Shubman Gill won the best men’s cricketer of the year, named after the former India captain Polly Umrigar, for the first time in his career. On the other hand, Deepti Sharma won the same award for the second time, having won it for the 2019-20 season.

Apart from them, Ravichandran Ashwin and Smriti Mandhana have taken the honors for the 2020-21 season while Bumrah and Mandhana for the 2021-22 season. Gill made his progress in international cricket after becoming part of the team regularly in January last year. Deepti, meanwhile, was a key member of an India side that won the Women’s Asia Cup and the Asian Games gold medal in a year packed with T20I action.

Ravi Shastri wins the Lifetime Achievement Award

Former India head coach and 1983 World Cup winner, Shastri has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. While being part of the historic 1983 World Cup in England, his career was over in the early 30s due to persistent knee problems. After his playing career ended, moved effortlessly into TV commentary, where he established himself as an incisive voice with a distinctively punchy manner of calling big moments.

While he only got to captain India in one of his 80 Tests, he got a wider canvas to express his skills as a tactician and man-manager as coach: his stints at the helm of India’s men’s team from 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2021 coincided with their rise as an all-formats, all-conditions force. Under him India became a near-invincible Test team at home and achieved unprecedented levels of competitiveness away from home, most memorably winning two successive series in Australia in 2018-19 and 2020-21.

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