Actor-director Sudeep may have been moved to tears when his team Karnataka Bulldozers lost the cup to Chennai Rhinos at India’s first ever Celebrity Cricket League (CCL) tournament, but now that he’s back home, he insists, “We may have been beaten, but we’re not broken.”
For the team that had, until the finals, won every single match — the loss came more as a surprise. “It does hurt, especially if you look at the kind of effort that each of the actors on the team has put in,” says Sudeep. It also happened to be the one team that almost everybody present felt would win the cup.
So what really changed on the big day? “I would say it was a bad day. We ended up making all our mistakes on one day, but that unfortunately happened to be the day that really mattered. Yes, this is a game and we are not cricketers but professional actors. But ours was the team that took the game most seriously. Some of the other team owners even told us that they were revamping their own teams to at least try to match up to the kind of dedication that our team showed. We had set a benchmark in a way. Which is why losing this match meant a lot more than just a game,” he explains.
