“When you leave one place, you open other doors. So, my entry to social media was planned. I started writing on Twitter which led to my commentary stints. I started the trend of funny birthday wishes,” said Virender Sehwag while explaining his wacky social media posts on day two of Goafest 2019.
Among the many funny anecdotes the former Indian batsman delivered, was one about his wife and mother.
“My T-shirt number used to be 44. I hadn’t asked for it, but got it because I replaced Sairaj Bahatule in the team, who had that jersey number. I hid his name, but since the numbers were in a big font, I couldn’t hide them. When I was stuck in a bad phase, my mom spoke to a pandit and got it changed from 44 to 46. My wife spoke to an astrologer and urged me to wear number two. I made two jerseys and wore them alternatively till ICC came out with a rule that allowed me to only wear one number.”
Sehwag looked to ease his mother and wife’s concerns by requesting the ICC to play without a number to not annoy either.
Speaking about legends and leaders, Sehwag stated that according to him the Indian team has had only four cricketers who are worthy of being called the legends – Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble.
On the leaders topic, he said the good ones are those who can delegate well and gave an example of how MS Dhoni gets the best out of his current Chennai Super Kings team.
“The team doesn’t have one good bowler who is playing at the international stage, but yet they’re topping the table.”
But while he thought Dhoni is a good leader, he claimed that the best he played for was Sourav Ganguly before sharing his thinking before the famous 326 run target the team chased down in 2002 against England.
“I was calm while the others weren’t. I told them that we could chase it easily because we were a better batting unit than England was at the time. I was regularly chasing down targets like 140 in 10 overs in club cricket, and hence thought this 326 run target wasn’t tough to attain,” said Sehwag.
He then had further praise for Ganguly as he placed him higher than both Dhoni and Kohli among the recent great captains.
“Dhoni had a more ready team while Ganguly took over straight after the match fixing debacle and set the team. He was a quick decision maker and that helped. While we reached number one in Test cricket only under Dhoni, the majority of the journey was completed under Anil Kumble. Even Dhoni will acknowledge this fact if you ask him this question off record.”
The talk ended with the moderator asking Sehwag about who is the right person to lead India as the prime minister. He responded by asking if her channel was pro BJP or against it before stating that the next leader of the country should be one who is gutsy to take decisions and takes those for the benefit of the country and not for the party he/she represents.
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