Sourav Ganguly birthday special: How dada cherry-picked six champions who debuted under his captaincy

For the longest time, the present BCCI President Sourav Ganguly, who turned 48 today, has been known for pulling the Indian Cricket team through a series of hurdles like match-fixing allegations. Throughout his captaincy, Ganguly picked cricketers who showed raw talent and are now dubbed to be champion cricketers.

Known for breaking the tradition of bringing players from metropolitan cities, he brought in the likes of MS Dhoni, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra.

“That (2011 World Cup-winning team) team had seven or eight players who started their careers under me. The likes of (Virender) Sehwag, Dhoni himself, Yuvraj (Singh), Zaheer (Khan), Harbhajan Singh, Ashish Nehra. So I think that’s a legacy which I was extremely happy to leave behind as a captain. And that was my biggest legacy that I left a side which had the ability of winning at home and away from home,” Ganguly told CricketTimes.

On Dhoni’s 39th birthday, Ganguly spoke at length about the Indian skipper. He picked Dhoni for the first time for India’s ODI series against Bangladesh in 2004 when the selectors were in a fix regarding which wicketkeeper to pick.

Ganguly also holds the third position in ‘most matches as captain’ and has led India in as many as 196 international matches where the team won 97 games with a winning average of 49.48%. He has 11,363 runs and 22 ODI hundreds to his name. Even as he is known as one of India’s best opening batsmen that Indian cricket has ever been produced, the BCCI boss Sourav Ganguly has revealed once again that he became a cricketer by “accident”.