ICC T20 World Cup and Mental Health 

When we hear about cricket world cup, we know that there will be chaos everywhere during the world cup. The true fans of cricket will enjoy the matches and will watch their favorite players, some people will just watch it with their family and will be happy if their country wins or will not bother if they lose they don’t have much interest in sports anyway. Then comes the most strong and dangerous type of audience “Seasonal Fans”. They don’t know what are the rules and policies of game, which player is good at what and other technicalities of game. They just have this enormous amount of passion towards the game and they want their country to win the game at all costs. Now these are the fans that will cheer for the players and will support them only if they play good in that particular match, but will not spare them if they make a tiny mistake during the match. They will not consider other factors like the pitch condition, the player’s strength and weakness, the player’s history. The only thing that matters to them is if they perform well enough so that our country wins the match.

These are the fans that mostly affect the players’ mental health. Dealing with them is tough because they will burst in anger on you if you lose the game, especially if it is in South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan. These countries literally live on these moments of happiness. They will have extreme celebrations if their country wins and unfortunately will be extremely upset if they lose.

High Pressure Matches and their effect on the Cricketers 

These scenarios probably occur during high pressure matches or the matches for whom the fans anticipate for very long such as matches between India-Pakistan and England-Australia. In these matches where both countries have a rivalry between them, can be cultural or purely cricket based, the pressure is very high. Every player has to perform well because it’s more than just a game for the fans. It’s about their feelings attached with this whole situation. So the players feel burdened with the expectations from them, even a tiny mistake can cost them the whole match.

Such case can be seen in ICC T20 World Cup 2021, when talking about the match between India-Pakistan, India lost the match by 10 wickets and this loss was very upsetting for Indian fans and on the other side it was like a festival for Pakistani fans. But some extreme “Seasonal Fans” of India took this loss to heart and literally started threatening the Muslim Cricketer of Team India, Mohammad Shami, and accused him of being a traitor and he intentionally gave the match to Pakistan. They showed a great amount of Islam phobia towards the player that the Captain of Team India came to his defense.

After his statement the fans diverted their anger to Virat Kohli and some of them went so low that they started giving threats to his 10 months old daughter.

These kinds of incidents can affect the mental health of cricketers a great amount as they have to deal with the match’s pressure as well as their personal life. So these games also affect their personal life, which also plays a huge part on their mental health.

How should we deal with these issues

We as fans should not be take these wins and losses to their personal life. Their personal life, family, friends, religion and race have nothing to do with the games they play so we should support them and criticize them in our limits and leaving out their personal life.

And we also should not get grumpy with each other over such games for example if you’re friends with rival team, then you should just leave these to the game and move on. As we have seen very great examples of sportsmanship set by the players, we should also follow them and just take it as a game.