Sachin Tendulkar speaks about the language diversity in Indian dressing room

In a country like India, where there’s so much cultural and lingual diversity, it often gets difficult to the people from one region to communicate with the others. Sachin Tendulkar, the man who carried the burden of expectations for so long, recalled how difficult it was to cope with this lingual diversity.

The Indian dressing room had cricketers from all parts of the country. Hence, there were innumerable occasions when people sharing the same green room couldn’t understand each other. The Master Blaster was present at Rajdeep Sardesai’s book launch and he revealed a hilarious incident involving former cricketer Dodda Ganesh and legendary fast bowler Alan Donald.

“We were playing in South Africa in 1996. Allan Donald was bowling and he picked up a wicket. Dodda Ganesh walked in and he could not understand what I was saying. I said to him in Hindi, “Ganesh don’t worry and go on the front-foot. I told Ganesh how Donald was bowling and he responded with ‘okay sir.’ He would keep calling me sir and I said don’t call me sir and he responded with ‘okay sir,'” said Tendulkar.

“And it so happened Donald was trying to sledge Ganesh and I went and told Allan: “Tell me what you are trying to tell him and I would communicate that to him. I can’t promise I will be able to do it for sure, but I would try,” quoted the 44-year-old.

Bhuvneshwar and Pandya will be crucial when India travels overseas

It’s very hard to compare teams from different eras as the situations they tackled were completely different. The comparable common points between teams from different generations are very few, but it’s certain that the yester generation’s good performances instill confidence in the generations to come.

Tendulkar recalled how brilliant it felt to win the series in West Indies back in 2001. He said it was disappointing to come so close in 1996 at Johannesburg, but that’s all part and parcel of the game. He feels players like Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Hardik Pandya will make a huge difference overseas as team balance is something India failed to achieve for a long period of time.

“We came close to winning overseas in 1996 in Johannesburg but we weren’t able to cross that final hurdle. In West Indies in Trinidad we won in 2001-02 and that kind of changed things. By that time Rahul (Dravid) was there, Sourav (Ganguly) had played for good 5-6 years and Laxman was there, our batting was sort of settled but all in all, for winning abroad you need good bowling attack and we were able to pick 20 wickets,” he recollected.

“On a number of occasions, the problem was to pick 20 wickets and not give too many runs but that slowly started changing. Today, we have got a great balance in our team because all spinners can bat, seamers can bat. You saw yesterday (1st ODI against New Zealand), Bhuvneshwar played and Hardik Pandya, these guys are going to change the balance when we start travelling,” Tendulkar concluded.