Chronicle of a team foretold: Loving RCB is like running into a computer problem again and again

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

The great saint said this almost 800 years ago. The Bhagavad Gita says one of the ways of reaching the supreme state is through Bhakti Yoga, or the path of devotion. About 61 years ago, the Beatles sang, “All you need is love”.
In recent times, if you want to see the real path of love you need to be a fan of the IPL cricket franchise Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB). For most part of the last 16 years, since the IPL started, RCB have resembled a UPSC aspirant who makes it to the interview stage but doesn’t get selected.

This team has made three IPL finals, the last one was in 2016, and they have lost all three times. Yet, each time the IPL starts, it is the RCB fan who shows up on social media or in stadiums with that wisp of hope that everyone of us experiences, if only for a brief while, on the morning of January 1. Now, that’s unalloyed devotion.

DESIRE & DETERMINATION

It all begins with desire, doesn’t it? That’s the motivation that really all champions have and so do their fans. All fans want their team to not just do well but win the cup, the trophy, the big prize. In the early years, the RCB management, then Vijay Mallya, invested in some of the best players available at the time: Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Jacques Kallis, Dale Steyn, Misbahul-Haq, Robin Uthappa, Kevin Pietersen and a young Virat Kohli (who has remained with the franchise till today). But the team’s performance was far from satisfactory. Mallya went on record then, saying: “The biggest mistake was to abstain from the selection of the