Virender Sehwag, the former Indian cricketer now-a-days is more famous for his comic timing and social media trolls. Now, he does not leave any stone unturned to make people laugh through his jokes on social media but was he the same person during his playing days? Seems so.
Indian cricketer Ravichandran Ashwin during a talk show with Vikram Sathaye ‘What The Duck’, revealed that Sehwag used to hate the team meetings as he did not want to play with any strategy. Ashwin narrated an interesting story from the World Cup 2011 – where Sehwag during a team meeting threatened to withdraw from the game if the allotted number of passes was not given to him,
“During the team meeting in 2011, when we were playing England at Bangalore, Gary (Kirsten, former India coach) had scheduled a meeting at 10am. Prior to the meeting, Sehwag had told Gary that he wanted to discuss something at that meeting. While everybody thought that Sehwag wanted to contribute tips or discuss learnings from the previous game, Sehwag, his usual witty self, began discussion around the complimentary passes that every player was eligible to receive,” said Ashwin.
“Everybody at that meeting was thrown off by initiation of this discussion. Sehwag mentioned that he got to know that all players were eligible for six passes, but were being given only three. So he decided to take matters in his own hands and mentioned that come what may, before the toss, the team must be handed over their passes. This was the first meeting that went on for a whole 20 mins. Viru had also threatened to not play the game if the passes were not given to the players.
He just wanted to see the ball and hit it. Thus, Sehwag used to be the least participative during such team meetings. There used to be a presentation that would run, followed by a short speech addressed by Gary. MS (Dhoni) would then take over, would not utter a word and that was how the meetings would end,” he added.