Anushka Sharma Blamed For Indian Cricket Team's Loss, Again

On Sunday, June 11, the Indian cricket team lost the World Test Championship 2023 final against Australia. Once again, fans began trolling Virat Kohli's wife Anushka Sharma and blamed her for the team's performance.

One person took to Twitter and said that as a "true fan" of Kohli, they noticed that when Sharma is present at the stadium, neither Kohli nor the team played well. The fan asked Sharma to stop attending matches in hopes that it would improve the Indian cricket team's chance of winning.

People instantly slammed the Twitter user and called him out for his unreasonable logic. One wrote used his reasoning against him and said that the "true fan" had also been watching the matches and might have caused the team's loss.

While this "advice" is one of the tamer reactions to India losing a cricket match, it follows the pattern of netizens blaming cricketers and their female relatives as soon as things go wrong.

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Anushka Sharma Trolled

Unfortunately, this does not mark the first time that Sharma has been blamed for the outcome of a cricket match. Virat Kohli, Anushka Sharma, and their daughter Vamika are often thrown into the limelight when a cricket match is lost.

While Kohli is one of the players, it's unclear how Sharma and Vamika can be blamed for the team's performance. Moreover, no matter how Kohli performs, it does not warrant the vitriol he receives after a loss.

Unfortunately, the trend of dragging families into the conversation and hurling abuses at them has continued over the years. In 2021, when Vamika Kohli was only nine months old, a Twitter user angered by the team losing a match threatened to rape Kohli's daughter. In 2020, a 16-year-old boy issued rape threats to Mahendra Singh Dhoni's daughter.

More recently, fans hurled abuses at Shubman Gill and his sister, Shahneel Gill. The cricketer was sent death threats, while his sister was verbally abused. One troll went to the extent of sharing Shahneel's Instagram handle on Twitter and encouraged others to abuse her.

Is the outcome of a sports match more important than people's lives, safety, and happiness? Do the harassers even know why they're blaming a cricketer's daughter, wife, or sister, for losing a match? If a sole cricketer cannot control the outcome of a match, how can their female relatives impact the match?

Doesn't Anushka Sharma have the right to watch her husband as he represents India? Shouldn't she be able to go watch a cricket match without being blamed for the team's performance?

Sharma is a successful woman with her own career and personal life, however, as soon as she enters the cricket stadium, fans reduce her to Kohli's wife. Not only that but she's also dubbed as "panauti" (bad luck).

I won't claim that cricket players aren't relentlessly harassed on the basis of their performance, but the fact that their female relatives are also dragged into the social media harassment reeks of sexism.