Former Indian tennis player Sania Mirza recently discussed her thoughts on the social media trolling that she faced during her career and how to overcome it. The six-time Grand Slam Champion sat down in chat with the host speaker Mayanti Langer at the Future Makers Conclave (FMC) at the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2025. They were also joined by another guest, India Women’s team cricketer Richa Ghosh.
Sharing her wisdom on online trolling, Sania said, “Social media cannot make or break your day. 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.”
She added, “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.”
Sania also recalled her past experiences of the same during her career growth as a female tennis star. Sania believes the media make stories about an athlete’s life, which sometimes leads to criticism of the players in return.
“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 concluded.
Richa Ghosh on handling criticism
Meanwhile, Indian women’s cricketer Ghosh has a different outlook and perspective on handling social media trolling. In her opinion, she believes that the criticism gained provides growth for 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,” Ghosh said.
Ghosh says the more the criticism, the more the fans and the more the attendance of people coming to watch women’s cricket.
She added, “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.”
(Inputs sourced from NDTV)
