Kohli: Chasing Sachin for a Sunday birthday bash

The idea of Virat Kohli masks, reportedly 70,000 of them, got nixed by the Indian board.

- Dhiman Sarkar

Eden holds a little less but with these things, the Cricket Association of Bengal possibly thought it best to err on the side of caution. What if someone wants a Kohli face in front and back? Anyway, Eden could be filled three times its 67,000 capacity and still the demand-supply equation would be skewed towards the former.

But even if that won't happen, it will still be Kohli's birthday on Sunday. And what better way to mark it than by scaling Mount 49 and join Sachin Tendulkar as the only other batter to have got there? It nearly happened in Dharamsala and Mumbai but will Kohli be third time lucky here? At a venue where in 2009 he had scored 184 off 121 balls playing for Mohun Bagan in a winning cause in the final of a CAB tournament.

Numbers don't matter in sport, till they do. Wimbledon has a clip on X of Serena Williams looking exasperated, rolling her eyes and saying, "You know the answer to that," and the interlocuter saying, "I tried," to which Williams snorts and laughter breaks out in the press room. The question was on her getting to Margaret Court's record of 24 Grand Slam titles.

Having won the 2017 Australian Open when she was two months pregnant, Williams played four Grand Slams finals but couldn't get there before retiring.