3. Yorkshire CCC's bonding sessions were "eccentric and hilarious"
During his summer at Headingley in 1992 Sachin loved Yorkshire’s team bonding sessions known as the Sunday Club. He describes one in which it was agreed everyone would wear “towels and a tie without a shirt” and meet in the hotel lobby. He thought it was a wind up. “I kept a close eye on the lobby and only when I saw a number of my team-mates sporting a towel and tie did I do the same.” He writes it turned out to be an “eccentric and hilarious” evening. Indeed.
4. Sachin loves Nasser Hussain
The book touches upon almost every match Sachin played at international level but is surprisingly thin on detail of contests against England. However, one section will be cut out and pinned on the wall of the Hussain household. “Among the captains I played against, I consider Nasser Hussain the best. He was an excellent strategist and, even if some of his tactics occasionally bordered on the negative, he was a very good thinker on the game and was proactive.”
7. Indian players had a gun pulled on them in a London tube train
Not an incident involving Sachin directly but he reveals in his book how Navjot Singh Sidhu and Sourav Ganguly got in to a confrontation on a tube train in London (hard to believe it could happen to such mild-mannered men …) which ended with a gun being pulled on them. “Sourav’s first reaction was to drop to the ground and cover his face in fright, but then he started pleading with the boy and dragged Navjot away as quickly as he could.”
11. Sachin loves his food ... and ran riot in Pizza Hut
On just the third page of the book Sachin describes his mother as the “best cook in the world for me” who would make him “delicious fish and prawn curry, baigan bharta and varan bhaat (lentils and rice)”. He says he owes his “appetite and love of food” to her. He reveals how he dined in KFC and fish and chips while playing for Yorkshire and became an expert in how to maximise the salad bar in Pizza Hut. He writes he learned how to use “lettuce leaves to construct a wall, so that the size of the bowl, which was normally just two to three inches tall, increased to five or six inches. We could then fill it with as much salad as we wanted.”
12. He even won an award for his eating
At the famous Harry Ramsden’s café in Guisely, West Yorkshire, Sachin conquered the Harry’s Challenge as easily as making a hundred on a flat deck in Ahmedabad. It entailed eating a “giant portion” of fish, chips, bread and butter with two side dishes. He polished off the fish “fairly comfortably” plus the salad and side dishes. But being a true pro Sachin left the chips. “I thought they might be too fattening”. He was given his certificate anyway as the chef was “impressed with my performance”.
