Sourav Ganguly reveals Team India's dressing room stories

Sourav Ganguly spoke about Sehwag’s singing

Former India captain Sourav Ganguly has revealed a tad bit about some of the stories that transpired in the Indian dressing room over the years, at the NDTV Support My School Program last weekend. The dressing room is often considered to be as important for a player’s career as the 22 yards, and the circumstances during which Ganguly took over as skipper, demanded as much from the players, as it did from the captain himself.

And Ganguly was extremely lucky, as he admits, for he had the likes of Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, and Anil Kumble to accompany him and release India from the shackles that it had found itself in.

"Lots of young players came in the side and the situation was automatically sorted out. We had the support of Sunil Gavaskar, who guided the side during that tough time. We had outstanding players like Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble and Tendulkar. It was the period which produced the greatest talents," Ganguly said.

Ganguly’s reign as India captain saw the arrival and blossoming of some of India’s finest players of the modern era, that included Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh and Zaheer Khan. He had one interesting piece of revelation about Sehwag and his approach to the game.

"When chasing a total of 325, Sehwag would sing a song. Somebody as great as a Sunil Gavaskar would never have dreamt something like this in his life...If the team is chasing 300, Tendulkar would turn on the music on," remarked Ganguly, on some of the rather unorthodox practices that used to do the rounds of the dressing room.

Having said that, it was of little surprise that some of India’s most remarkable moments in its rich history came under Ganguly’s captaincy. Whether it was the immortal Kolkata Test of 2001, the Headingly Test of 2002 or the Adelaide Test of 2003, many of India’s vantage points were reached with Ganguly at the helm.

Under Ganguly, India reached the final of the 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup, and almost created history, before they were ousted by the the reigning World champions, Australia. They also reached the final of the ICC Champions Trophy (then known as the ICC Knockout Trophy) in 2000, and 2002, but victory eluded them on both occasions.

Ganguly took reins when India had almost become an irrelevant Test playing nation, and when left, India were the team that the entire world wanted to beat. He finished his career scoring 7,212 runs from 113 Tests at an average of 42.17 and 11,363 runs from 311 ODIs at 41.02.