Virat Kohli was right: Every cricket loss still finds a woman to blame

The 19th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) ended on May 31 with an action-packed finale. An underdog RCB lifted the trophy for the second consecutive time, serving fans yet another Bollywood-esque season of cricket. Social media quickly did what it does best. Fan edits flooded timelines, set to dramatic background scores and nostalgic anthems. Videos of Virat Kohli lifting the IPL 2026 trophy played to ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All. Every scroll brought a new tale of an unsung hero, a comeback story, or a redemption arc years in the making.

The IPL has always been more than a cricket tournament. It is a reality show, a soap opera and a blockbuster franchise rolled into one. Every season produces its heroes and villains, its heartbreaks and fairy-tale endings. This year was no different.

But one set of characters never quite made it into those highlight reels: the women.

As fans celebrated victories and mourned defeats, a familiar pattern played out online. After a heated on-field exchange between Virat Kohli and Travis Head, abusive comments flooded the Instagram account of Head’s wife. When players underperform, wives and girlfriends often become targets. When teams lose, families are dragged into the fallout. In previous years, Anushka Sharma has routinely been blamed for Kohli’s form, while MS Dhoni’s young daughter has been subjected to horrific threats from disgruntled fans. Even children, who have nothing to do with the game, are rarely spared.

For all the talk of cricket being a gentleman’s game, Indian fandom has developed a less flattering tradition. Every season seems to produce a new search for someone to blame, and more often than not, that search extends beyond the boundary rope. The match may end on the field, but for the families of cricketers, the abuse is often just getting started.

Women often lose the gentlemen’s game

One of the most talked-about moments of IPL 2026 came when Virat Kohli appeared to snub Australian batter Travis Head during the post-match handshake after RCB’s loss to SRH. The two players had exchanged heated words on the field, and Kohli’s early dismissal only seemed to intensify the scrutiny around the incident. While cricket fans debated who was right and who crossed the line, social media had already chosen a different target altogether.

Trolls flooded the Instagram account of Travis Head’s wife, Jessica, with abusive, derogatory, and overtly sexual comments. For Jessica, however, the abuse was hardly new. She later revealed that the online hostility from Indian cricket fans felt eerily similar to what her family experienced after Australia’s victory over India in the 2023 ODI World Cup final.

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This is not an isolated episode. For years, Anushka Sharma has been subjected to relentless trolling whenever Virat Kohli’s form has dipped or India has suffered a high-profile defeat. The actor has repeatedly been blamed for performances she had absolutely no role in, prompting Kohli himself to call out the tendency to drag women into conversations about men’s failures.

Nor does the abuse stop at wives and girlfriends. In 2020, after Chennai Super Kings lost to Kolkata Knight Riders, rape threats were directed at MS Dhoni’s then five-year-old daughter, Ziva. The sheer cruelty of the incident sparked outrage, but it also revealed how quickly sporting disappointment can morph into something far darker online.

Even beyond the boundary rope, women connected to cricketers continue to face disproportionate scrutiny. The divorces of Hardik Pandya and Natasa Stankovic, and Yuzvendra Chahal and Dhanashree Verma, unleashed waves of speculation, slut-shaming and character assassination aimed largely at the women involved.

Different incidents, different circumstances, but the pattern remains strikingly familiar: in Indian cricket, women often end up paying the price for a game they never played.

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Why patriarchy enters the stadium

The troubling part about these incidents is not simply that cricket fans are abusive. Sports fandom can be irrational everywhere. Rivalries become personal, defeats sting and social media often amplifies the worst impulses of supporters.

What makes the Indian cricket ecosystem different is who repeatedly ends up carrying the blame.

When Virat Kohli struggles for form, questions somehow find their way to Anushka Sharma. When Travis Head upsets Indian fans, his wife becomes a target. When Hardik Pandya or Yuzvendra Chahal’s marriages fall apart, it is their former partners who are subjected to relentless moral scrutiny. Even a child like Ziva Dhoni is not spared.

These women have little to do with the events that trigger the outrage. Yet they are repeatedly pulled into the conversation because Indian society has long been comfortable treating women as extensions of the men in their lives. A man’s success belongs to him, but his failures are often shared with the women around him.

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That instinct is hardly new. For generations, women have been blamed for everything from unhappy marriages to family disputes and professional setbacks. Social media has not created that mindset; it has merely digitised it. The cricket field has become another stage on which old patriarchal habits play out in real time.

This is why the abuse directed at cricketers’ families cannot be dismissed as harmless trolling or overenthusiastic fandom. The language used is often deeply gendered. Women are not criticised for tactical decisions or poor performances. They are sexualised, slut-shamed, threatened and turned into symbols of bad luck. Their greatest offence is often being visible.

The IPL may market itself as a celebration of cricket, but every season also reveals something uncomfortable about the society watching it. For all our talk of progress, we remain remarkably eager to make women answer for the actions of men. Whether it is a wife blamed for a batter’s poor form, a former partner vilified during a divorce, or a child subjected to threats after a loss, the pattern remains depressingly familiar.

Long before social media gave fans a comment section, Indian society had already perfected the art of holding women responsible for men’s failures. Years ago, while defending Anushka Sharma from online abuse, Virat Kohli summed it up in a single sentence: “For some reason, people in our country love to blame women.”