Ravi Shastri praises MS Dhoni, leaves Sourav Ganguly out of best captains list
Mumbai: While former Indian cricketer Ravi Shastri is well known for his eloquence, he may have ruffled a few feathers by leaving Sourav Ganguly’s name out from his list of best Indian captains.
Shastri, who has become one of the iconic commentators in modern day cricket over the years, recently listed his favourite Indian captains after Mahendra Singh Dhoni stepped down as the limited overs captain last week.
The 54-year-old praised Dhoni for leading the Indian cricket team to glory for the last nine years.
“My salaam to a dada captain,” Shastri said to Wisden India. “MS has won everything there is to win; he really has nothing to prove. Again, the reason I say he has nothing to prove is that he is easily India’s most successful captain, by a distance. There is no one even close to him in that regard,” he was quoted as saying.
Interestingly, former India skipper Sourav Ganguly is fondly called ‘dada’, which in his mother tongue, means ‘elder brother’.
Shastri is known to have had a feud with former India skipper Ganguly. The 54-year-old Shastri who was the director of the Indian cricket team last year had unsuccessfully applied for the post of the Indian cricket team coach.
Later, he had publicly criticised Ganguly (who was a part of the committee that interviewed candidates for the post) for not being present in the panel when Shastri was being interviewed.
Now Shastri has stirred-up further controversy by leaving Ganguly’s name from his list of favourite Team India captains. While he opined that Dhoni has been India’s best captain, Shastri named three other former skippers in his list. Notably, Sourav Ganguly, also regarded to be one of the best skippers India has had, is not on this list.
“The names that follow in that list a fair distance behind are Kapil Dev, who led India to the World Cup title in 1983 and because of whom we won the Test series in England in 1986,” said Shastri.
“And Ajit (Wadekar) in an era before there was one-day cricket, when we won successive Test series in the West Indies and then England in 1971. And of course,Tiger (Pataudi) for flamboyance. There is no one else,” he was quoted saying.
