5 Inspirational life stories of IPL cricketers

4. T Natarajan

Until the age of 20, T Natarajan, who is emerging as India’s new T20I specialist, had only played tennis-ball cricket and barely had seen a proper cricket ground. With a family who lives in a village 36km off Salem, Natarajan is the eldest of five siblings and has done all sorts of odd jobs like newspaper selling or milk distribution to help his family, which also runs a small tea shop in his village.

With his tennis-ball cricket prompting him to play a lot of local tournaments, soon Natarajan was scouted by some officials which made him first play in the divisional TNCA matches back in 2010-11. Due to his ability to bowl quality yorkers, which had mainly emerged from his tennis-ball play, aided Natarajan to climb up the ladder especially by playing for the Jolly Rovers team of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association.

While just making it into Tamil Nadu’s Ranji team, Natarajan was then suspected for his bowling action which predominately swayed him away at least for two years. However, with the help of BCCI officials, soon came a rectification and in IPL 10, Natarajan was first picked by the PBKS (then KXIP)  franchise for a whopping amount of INR 3 Crores. All in all, from not playing cricket in proper facilities to now being the only left-arm pacer to be in the reckoning for the Indian team, T Natarajan’s story is a typical tale that every small-town boy in India dreams of.