Cricket in India is very fortunate to have a massive following. The interest in the game as well as in those playing it means that there is no shortage of views and comments about the game, the team, the individual players, officials, selectors, commentators  and anybody even with a tenuous connection with the game. The IPL has helped generate another fiendishly loyal following which sometimes can mean that Indian supporters only want and like players from the franchise they support to do well and are quite blasé, if not actually happy, that a player from a rival franchise team has not done well even when he is playing for the country. 

Not that this is a totally new phenomenon but has happened to a slightly lesser extent in the past when fans of individual players, who in the minds of the supporters, were rivals even though they were teammates playing against another country. To give a few examples, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi v Ajit Wadekar or GR Viswanath v Gavaskar or Gavaskar v Kapil Dev or Dravid v Tendulkar and now Kohli v Rohit Sharma. The fans of these players wanted not just their player to do well, but his so called rival or competitor to fail even though they were both playing for India. That’s the kind of passionate following the game generates in India.