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Sourav Ganguly files: 'Greg Chappell was not alone in sacking me and thwarting my 2007 World Cup dream'

Sourav Ganguly files: 'Greg Chappell was not alone in sacking me and thwarting my 2007 World Cup dream.' Ganguly said he wanted to captain India in the World Cup held in the West Indies in 2007.

Sourav Ganguly said he wanted to captain India in the World Cup held in the West Indies in 2007

Kolkata, July 10: Sourav Ganguly, the former Indian captain and the current BCCI president, said he wanted to lead India in the 2007 World Cup but the dream was snatched away from him after being dropped from the team during the 2005-06 season.

Ganguly rated the omission from the team as the biggest setback of his career and called "an absolute injustice" but as the popular perception goes, he did not blame Greg Chappell alone for the incident.

"That was the biggest setback of my career. It was an absolute injustice. I know you can't get justice all the time but even then that treatment could have been avoided. I was the captain of the team which had just won in Zimbabwe and I get sacked after returning home?," Ganguly told Bengali daily Sangbad Pratidin.

"I dreamt of winning the 2007 World Cup for India. We had lost in the final the previous time (2003). I had reasons to dream too. The team had played so well under me for the last five years whether it was home or away. Then you suddenly drop me? First, you say I'm not in the ODI side, then you drop me from the Test team too," Ganguly said.

The general view is that Australian Greg Chappell's autocratic ways were the behind those tumultuous times. However, Ganguly said Chappell was not the lone person to blame.

"I don't want to blame Greg Chappell alone. There is no doubt about the fact that he was the one who started it," he said. "He suddenly sends an email against me to the board which gets leaked too. Does something like this happen? A cricket team is like a family. There can differences of opinion, misunderstandings in the family but that should be sorted out with dialogue. You are the coach, if you believed that I should play in a certain manner then come and tell me. When I returned as a player he had specified the same things then why not earlier?"

"The others are not innocent either. A foreign coach who doesn't have any say in the selection cannot drop an Indian captain. I had understood that this is not possible without the support of the entire system. Everyone was involved in the scheme to drop me. But I didn't crumble under pressure. I didn't lose confidence in me," he said.

Story first published: Friday, July 10, 2020, 10:43 [IST]
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