TLI Staff
New Delhi: Sourav Ganguly, BCCI President and former cricketer, the affable dada of Indian cricket is counted among best cricket team captains till date, not without his fair share of controversies of course. From his row with Greg Chappell, his clashes with the cricket authority, breaking norms by taking off his shirt to celebrate victory at Lords’, Ganguly was an unconventional captain.
The veteran cricketer on Neha Dhupia’s chat show got candid about his off-the-field equations with fellow cricketers, how he started playing the game, and his lockdown experience among other things.
Ganguly has resumed work at BCCI post coronavirus-induced lockdown and has been shooting for commercials etc, but is hoping for this tough phase to pass .
“It’s been too long, isn’t it? But, we’ve opened up. Calcutta has opened up. So, it’s not been lockdown for me since maybe, June. I’ve started going to the office. I’m at the office at the moment and I’ve started shooting. I do my shoots, my commercials, I had to finish my show. So, I did that last month and BCCI work is regular because we are hosting the IPL in Dubai so its not been a lockdown that much since the month of June. Yes, we were careful. Travelling has not been at all a part of our lives as it was before. I used to be in Bombay every week. Ya, the BCCI office trying to get cricket going and working and everything, so. It’s been different. More than the lockdown, I think, the situation has been very difficult to handle, mentally. Trying to live with fear, you never experience when you met someone, the first thing which comes to your mind is he tested, is he okay, hope he is not going to infect you. So, that’s not the right way to lead life but hopefully, this will pass. We’ve gone through it for 5 and half months now and at some stage, I think somehow we are used to it now, expecting it to pass and then hopefully get back to normal in the next couple of months or 3-4 months, we don’t know,” he said.
The cricketer is in touch with his buddies over SMS and phone calls but could not meet them for months while he was in Calcutta during the nationwide lockdown.
“Not catching up but, maybe SMS. I just had a call from Yuvraj Singh, day before yesterday. He wants to play cricket, again. But yes, I’ve been in touch on and off with everyone. In Bombay, it’s a bit different because you have 4 or 5 or 6 of them in same city. That makes life a lot easier. But, from Calcutta, I think I am the only one. So, it’s either on phone or hello, or a tweet or an Instagram post and then having a laugh on it. Those were great days actually,” he said about the lockdown period.
Ganguly shared how he did not face any resistance in pursuing his passion from his family and found playing cricket an escape from academics and practiced on fielf for hours together.
“My father was desperate that I played the game. So, when I just passed out of school, he put me in an academy where I used to practice. Nothing in mind, just go and practice, and hit the ball and get away from home because those days, there were no computers, no mobiles so if you were not doing anything at home, mother wanted you to study. So, to get away from those big piles of books, cricket bat was a better option so you would go away in the afternoon, practice for three hours, meet your friends for two hours and five hours would be gone. So, it kept you away from home, kept you away from your parents’ discipline. So, that’s how it started at a young age. I just kept playing. I used to play Soccer quite a bit. Calcutta being a football crazy city in those days, still is. But, cricket has taken over I think. Life was a lot fun because you were not restricted by television, not restricted by mobiles. So, that’s how I started playing the game,” he revealed.
The cricketer said he always went by his gut feeling and never imposed any rules on any team member. He believed in letting them be and got a lot of respect from his colleagues.
“I just went with gut-feel. It is not right to believe that you have the eye and you’ll always go with it. I was given a responsibility. What I said to myself the day I got this responsibility was I’ll do the best what I can. I’m not just going to look at others and see and evaluate myself every time, whether I’m right, wrong, whether I’m doing the right things. I’ll just do what I know is best. As long as in my mind I know it’s good for Indian cricket, I’ll do it. I worked a lot on mindset also.
Mindset in the sense, I’m a very easy person to work with. I’ve got no baggage. I don’t hound people. I don’t sit at their backs all the time, telling them that is my way, either you do it or we’ll find somebody else. So, I let people be. People express themselves. And, the likes of young Sehwag, Nehra, Nehra was the best of the lot. I even started being a fan of his, when one fine morning, he picked up his bags and baggage, went from Delhi to Goa to lead a happy life, I said, ‘Why did you do that?’. He said, ‘Delhi had too much pollution’. I said, ‘Only Nehra can do this.’
So, from that point of view they were all different. I think he needs friends also, he can’t stay alone. He wants his friends to be around, he wants people to listen to him. Of all his opinions and ideas and all the rubbish he will speak, you will have to listen. And you will hear it with the same intensity. And when it was young Yuvraj Singh who we dealt with, then there was Zaheer, so, fantastic people. I enjoyed my time with them. They knew how to respect and the best part of them was they were very adjustable. They went around their job being adjustable not being very pull-headed or stuck to certain things and I enjoyed their company. They also brought freshness because they were younger than me and youth always is something absolutely brilliant to deal with so they were great players in the dressing room, Sachin, Rahul, Anil, Laxman, Sehwag – they were all different,” he added.
‘Sachin is the best captain I ever had’
“It’s very difficult to say. But obviously when I came in, Sachin was captain, my cricket blossomed under him because he gave me the freedom and gave me the opportunity to play the exposure which is required at that level so he will always be close to my heart. But, then if you see in terms of record, MS had just become captain when I finished, so in terms of record, I think MS will be right at the top. But, if you ask me, under whom my cricket really blossomed till I became captain in the year 2000, it would be Sachin. Because from 96 to 2000, I had him as my captain,” he said.
Inside details of the Indian Dressing Room
“It kept changing with every game. It depended on their form, how well they played, if they were scoring runs and taking wickets, you could see a lot more, a lot relaxed, a lot more freedom in the dressing room. If somebody wasn’t scoring runs so he was not in the best of the moods, he would be under pressure. If Anil Kumble was picking 5 wickets every game, he is the best guy to go to. If he was getting wacked around the ground, he is not the best guy to go to. So, Ashish Nehra was the another guy. If you would have dropped him a game, anytime he would get you 15 minutes in the dressing room he would take you to a corner and say ‘What a big mistake you’ve made by dropping me.’ Nehra is awesome and I miss meeting him, actually. I don’t know where he is in Goa. Everyone was different. Zaheer Khan was different, my coach John Wright who was one of my best friends in the team was different. It was great fun. That is what cricket was all about. It got people from Punjab, Bombay, Karnataka, Madras, Bangalore, Kolkata, and you live together, you share the dressing room together, you played for the country together and they were all different. Food habits were different, their music sense was different, their dressing sense was different, their way of celebration was different and that’s what made it so good and so special.”
When Ganguly played World Cup 2003 wearing Bhajji’s shoes
“We all had our superstitions. We wouldn’t say it. We would quietly keep it to ourselves hoping that kisi ka nazar na lag jaye. I would put the left pad first. I don’t know what Sachin did. I saw once Sachin having the black band in his hand for a long period of time. I asked him what is this for? He quietly said, Anjali ne daal diya and didn’t say what is it for. I didn’t ask also, maybe he didn’t want to say it. A lot of them believed ki agar koi kuch mannat kiya hai toh bolna zaruri nahi hai. So, you wouldn’t go to that extent to ask.
Everybody had their own thing. Some wore the same shoe. I remember going to the World Cup in 2003 where we lost in the finals, I played that entire world cup with Harbhajan’s shoes. He had an old half-and-half spikes. I played one game with it, I got a 100 and I kept wearing that for the next 6-7 months. Cleaning it up and painting it up and whitening it up. So, we all had our own different ways. We would see Harbhajan wear the same turban at times when he would pick 5 wickets, 6 wickets, 8 wickets. So, all these small-small things we kept doing. Because you are under so much pressure, everyone is watching you. When you don’t play well, your driver says that you are not fit enough. I remember, against Pakistan, I was not getting runs and I got run out. So I came back home and my driver who worked with me for twenty years, picked up my kick-bag and said are you training enough? Because you are getting run out quite often these days. So you deal with all those things. It’s fun but at the same time its not easy and it teaches you a lot of things to do in your career.
Cold war with coach Greg Chappell
“I have forgotten it. Because it’s too long. 14 years have gone by. So it’s just gone past me because with time, you get out of things. But, then as you said, it happens, things happen in life. When you work with a group of people, some may like you some may not like you, so, that was one of those instances. But, that’s gone past me. It’s too long now,” he said.
On MS Dhoni’s retirement
“Every good thing has got to come to an end because sports is like that. The best in the business have to finish. You see Tendulkar in cricket, Maradona in football, who was a huge, I’m a huge fan of Diego Maradona in football, Sampras, everyone has to go. India is absolutely proud that it had MS Dhoni, what he’s achieved in the shorter format of the game will be very hard to match by anyone in the future. I don’t believe in that word but I feel, it’s going to be a tough thing for anyone to match what he’s achieved in the shorter format,” he said.
‘I loved the young MS Dhoni’
“He was a very quiet person. He came from Ranchi, obviously. Anyone who walks into Indian dressing room takes a bit of time to settle down. But, I loved the young MS Dhoni, the way he batted, the way he hit the cricket ball with his long hair, that swagger, that perceived arrogance, he was not arrogant at all. It’s just the way he walked and his demeanour and his stature and the way he hit sixes and reacted, made him look like that. But, he was a very simple, straight-forward person from Ranchi who came during the time in 2005 and what a player he has been for India as I said, I enjoyed the young Dhoni who would just clear fences at will, never thought of taking singles, putting the balls in the gap, just thought of picking that heavy bat and hitting the balls into the stands. So, I liked that MS Dhoni very much,” said Ganguly.
On being a players’ man, pressures and much more
“I was a player myself, so I’m a player’s man, always. That’s what I was. We, in India are blessed with cricket, because it’s a sport which has all the benefits in the world you can ever imagine. It’s a sport. You want to be in a job which has pressure and I’ve always said that, you don’t want to turn up where people are laughing, smiling and whatever you did mattered, or did not matter. So you need to be in a job where whatever you did mattered and that’s what brings in pressure. So, pressure is part and parcel of life, whether you are doing a film, whether you’re playing cricket, you’re a businessman, you need to live with that pressure because it actually gets the best out of you, at times. You should be waking up in the morning nervous, trying to make a thing successful and I think that’s the best bit of life. So, I just try and help, try and make things work for the game. The game takes care of itself in India. People don’t have or administrators don’t have to do much running or hustle and bustle to get this game successful. You organize matches, you put tickets up on sale, the stands get filled in no time,” he says.
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