Ready to lord over England again

LONDON: Although both have shown their penchant for swirling shirts to celebrate victory, it seems a difference in taste for beverages created the strained relationship between Sourav Ganguly and Andrew Flintoff.

Flintoff, while playing with him for Lancashire in 2001, had sarcastically remarked: “It was like having ‘Prince Charles’ on your side.”

Five summers on, Ganguly explains the reason. “See, Flintoff thought I was aloof because I didn’t drink with them after the match. I never used to enjoy drinking. So I used to have my Coke and leave.

Plus I had my wife at home. For a county game I had to leave at 8.30 in the morning and come back at 8 at night.

Dona was alone the whole day — she knew nobody in Manchester. A girl alone at home... we’ve grown up in a different way,” he was quoted as saying by the Guardian on Wednesday.

India drew the four-match Test series and won the NatWest ODI series under Ganguly in their the last Tour to England in 2002.

Now, India’s most successful skipper returns to England one last time. No, he no more has that image — of a character so impossibly wealthy and spoilt that it is ultimately amusing.

A classic instance is the story of him instructing Michael Atherton to run off for a sweater for him, an account so far from the actual event that Atherton himself dismissed it as apocryphal.

“It was a strategy, one they learnt from the Aussies — to put the visiting captain under pressure. But the good thing is that unlike in India, they don’t put newspapers under your door in hotels abroad, so you’re not even aware of these things. Anyway, I’m not the captain now. Probably it’ll be slightly different this time,” Ganguly says.

To Chappell’s insinuation last year that Ganguly was clinging to captaincy due to financial motives, he would only say: “I didn’t expect it from a man of his stature.” He adds some more, but understandably requests it be left off the record. “The last thing I need is another controversy,” he says.

That’s the difference. Always one to take an eye for an eye, he is now more soulful, and a much more withdrawn man. “It was tough being out,” he painfully recalls, “because I always felt that me being dropped was something more than cricket.

Today it’s me, tomorrow it could be anybody else. It’s not easy switching on the television every day and seeing yourself being talked about, people saying your career is over.”

“Obviously, it hurt. Even my father would tell me, ‘Just forget it, you don’t need to do this’. I told him, ‘Let’s see if I’m good enough. I’ve seen the best part of a cricketer’s life, let’s see if I can get through this’,” the ‘Prince of Kolkata’ adds.

Even Nasser Hussain wrote of his own approach as captain as being one which “made us a more difficult side to beat, almost like Sourav Ganguly is with the Indian side”.