Trust me I hated the bugger when he was made captain for two reasons: a. I thought Kumble deserved to be the captain (he had just taken K'taka to the Ranji title recently in the late 90s), and b. this is irrational but Saurav was kinda competition in my eyes to Rahul (I liked Rahul a lot...
Saurav changed Indian cricket once and for all.
I am actually enjoying his new role in the commentary box
i come from bengal, in fact sourav's house is just few blocks away from mine, from the beginning the bengali newspaper has seen sourav and rahul as rivals...and u can easily assume whom they were praising, and whom blaming...suppose sourav scored a century and india won, the newspaper headline will be, "Sourav's Century Has Taken India to A Glorious Victory" or something like that, if in the next match sourav scores 0 and dravid scores a century and india wins, the headline will be "Sourav Failed, But India Still Won"...remember, when both of them went to england to play county cricket in 2000, sourav didn't get runs in the first few matches, then he finally got something like 45 or 46 in a county match, there was a huge report in the sports page (along with a picture) almost covering half of the page, reporting about the sheer class of sourav's innings...then at the end of that same report, there was a small thing said, in just 2 lines, that is rahul dravid is 182* after the first day in another match...there were reporting of this kind every day...and added to the bengalis going GA GA over ganguly, for whatever he does...i mean, it's probably happens that the local newspaper would praise the zonal cricketer a little more than others (though it should not be like that)...i don't know how the reporting was in karnataka those days, but the coverage and reporting of bengali newspapers on sourav ganguly was by far the most biased reporting i have ever seen anywhere...and as a result, i became, so to speak anti-sourav (news paper reportings and the people around), it was difficult to see, that there is one getting praises for doing nothing (sometimes), and there is another, after delivering match after match getting no credit...and in the process i probably ignored sourav's captaincy potential to some extent as well, i liked his come back though, and i became a fan of his in his last 2 years or so...
sourav has changed the face of indian cricket and by far the best captain of modern era of indian cricket
i am loving him as a commentator also, in fact, anyone who has seen his early career advertisements in T. V, would find it astonishing, i mean, the kind of progress in front of the camera he has made...he is a host of a popular T. V show that runs here, in bengal, called "Dadagiri" and he did a very good job there, after watching few episodes of that programme, i was confident that he would well as a commentator as well...
, it always saddened me to see a team with so much talent, somehow not being able to achieve what they can...wish there were more captains like him, 100% mate...100%
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