Sourav Ganguly presided over one in every of Indian cricket’s most celebrated dressing rooms, constructing a aspect that mixed a fiercely aggressive streak with a gaggle of personalities unafraid to have enjoyable at their captain’s expense. Harbhajan Singh has now recalled one such episode when an April Idiot’s prank involving Yuvraj Singh, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid grew to become so convincing that Ganguly was ready to surrender the India captaincy.
The incident occurred throughout India’s 2005 house sequence towards Pakistan, with the gamers deciding to focus on Ganguly forward of an ODI. What started as an elaborate dressing-room joke rapidly grew to become critical for the captain as soon as a number of the crew’s senior-most figures joined the act. “Puri crew baithi hui thi (your entire crew was sitting) once we created this drama and determined that we’ll make an April Idiot of Dada. Yuvi began it: ‘Dada, what is that this assertion that you’ve got given to the press?’ He informed him that you’ve got referred to as Yuvi celebration animal, Harbhajan ko kisi ki padi nahi hai, Ashish Nehra can be in his personal world and Zaheer Khan additionally events so much,” Harbhajan recalled in an interview with PTI.
The gamers had even ready pretend newspaper clippings carrying the supposed feedback, leaving Ganguly scrambling to know when he had criticised his personal teammates publicly. “Dada mentioned ‘when did I say this?’ Then we confirmed these clippings to him and mentioned, ‘What is that this?’”
Tendulkar and Dravid make Ganguly consider the prank
For the plan to work, nonetheless, Ganguly wanted to consider that the allegations have been real. That was the place Tendulkar and Dravid entered the image. Harbhajan revealed that the senior gamers had already been briefed and have been requested to confront their captain relatively than rescue him from the joke. “…we had already spoken to the seniors about this. I informed Paaji (Tendulkar), ‘Paaji, you inform him’. And he mentioned, ‘Dada, you probably have achieved this, that is flawed’. Rahul Dravid was additionally taking part in alongside, so he additionally mentioned, ‘Dada, this isn’t achieved, yaar’. When two senior gamers mentioned that, Dada thought (this have to be real).”
With Tendulkar and Dravid apparently questioning him as properly, Ganguly grew to become satisfied that the state of affairs had turned critical. His response confirmed simply how strongly he needed to clear his identify. “He mentioned ‘I swear, I didn’t do that. I’ll hand over the captaincy if I did this.’”
The prank didn’t cease there. As Ganguly examined the clippings, a number of gamers pretended that they had had sufficient and commenced leaving the dressing room with their luggage. “Whereas he was studying them, two or three of us picked up our luggage and began strolling out. Dada got here working after us, saying, ‘Arre yaar, wait, guys! The match is tomorrow. What are you folks doing?’”
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Ultimately, somebody broke character, and the reality emerged. Harbhajan admitted that the gamers subsequently felt responsible about how far that they had pushed a captain who had handled them extra like youthful brothers than subordinates. “Dada was the sort of captain whom we may idiot that day, however later we felt, ‘Yaar, we’ve actually put this respectable man via it.’ If it had been another captain, he would genuinely have made us choose up our luggage and informed us, ‘Get out of right here and go house’.”
“However he was like a giant brother,” Harbhajan mentioned, summing up a relationship that allowed one in every of Indian cricket’s strongest captains to turn out to be the unsuspecting sufferer of one in every of its most elaborate dressing-room pranks.
