Indian cricketers should stop complaining and start playing

The lead sports story in a Mumbai newspaper today is a report of a special T20 game that is to be played between South Africa and India in Johannesburg to mark 150 years of collaboration between the two countries. It's actually less of a report -- it doesn't for instance tell me exactly when the match is being played -- and more of a lament on the over-travelled and overburdened Indian cricket team. The article reads: '(The Indian team) left Mumbai on Wednesday and spent nearly eight hours in travel, covering 6963 km to play South Africa in a one-off T20 game. The hosts themselves spent more than 15 hours on a plane covering 11796 km between Wellington (New Zealand) and Johannesburg to be there in time. All this effort just to play a three-hour game that will mark 150 years of collaboration between the two countries.' It then goes on to list out the many back-to-back tournaments that the team has had to be part of, the pressure on players to perform and the impossibility of requesting the BCCI for rest (according to them, if a player wants to rest, he can't pull out. My way or the highway, it says). Then of course, there is the IPL, which according an unnamed player, few from the team seem to want to play. If there wasn't enough cricket, now you have two more months of it and the already overworked players are dragging themselves from one stadium to the other to play three-hour matches, attending the post-match parties (because they have to) and then flying out to another city for the same routine since perhaps their contract says so.