During a fireside talk at the Future Makers Conclave (FMC) in Bengaluru Tech Summit 2025, six-time Grand Slam champion Sania Mirza said while speaking with Indian cricketer Richa Ghosh, “Social media cannot make or break your day.”
Mayanti Langer, a sports journalist, moderated Sania’s sharing of her acquired knowledge.
“There are a couple of ways to handle it. She (Richa Ghosh) is still young, and my advice to her is just be as somebody who has faced and grown up in an era where electronic media and social media were coming.”
“When I was coming up, we were about just newspapers, and Sportstar was the only kind of window to sports. But then electronic media started coming, the tabloids started coming in. It started getting boring to talk just about forehands and backhands, and then they wanted to start talking about, you know, other things of an athlete’s life just to make things interesting, and then comes the criticism that you lost a match because you were out for dinner somewhere,” she added.
Sania recalled the ridiculous remarks she had to deal with in the past, saying, “It made me very thick-skinned. So, I actually find it quite humorous. I actually find it quite funny that people who have never held a cricket bat or a tennis racket or a boxing glove in their hand can have such a big opinion about what you do professionally.”
“And I feel really sad for them sometimes, because I’m like, you must really be unhappy with your life to hate someone you’ve never met who’s trying to represent the country at the highest level,” she added.
She expressed sympathy for the negative remarks made about her online, saying, “You don’t take the good to heart, and you don’t take the bad to heart. Because social media or media cannot make or break your day. It cannot be that important. What can make or break your day is what the people you love feel about you, who you love feels about you, what communication you have with them.”
When asked how she responds to criticism on social media, Ghosh, a young cricketer for the Indian women’s team who was raised in the social media age, offered a different viewpoint.
According to Gosh, criticism is a sign of progress in women’s cricket.
“To be honest, I take it very positively, because earlier in women’s cricket we didn’t have that many followers or fans. But now, as the numbers grow, the criticism will also grow. So I try to take that part positively,” she said.
According to Ghosh, the more criticism is received, the more people attend the game.
“I take that as a positive sign, because it means more people are watching, they’re liking what women’s cricket is doing, and they see the value in it. And in cricket today, the bigger it gets, the more people come to watch.”
