Yuvraj Singh is one of the prominent all-rounders of the India cricket team, particularly at the one-day international cricket. Perhaps one of the highlights but the most controversial moment in his cricketing career was during the 2007/08 series of the Border Gavaskar Trophy on Australian soil—the series that was marked with on-field confrontation and the infamous ‘Monkeygate’.
In a recent episode of the Club Prairie Fire podcast, Yuvraj narrated a funny but telling story from his time in Australia during this high-stakes series. At that time he was involved with an actress who was also in Australia for shooting.
He wanted to spend the time on cricket, and she thought it would be better to go to Canberra to watch the cricket together. Yuvraj said, “I said to her, Let us not meet for some time because I am on an Australia tour and need to concentrate.”
But she insisted on following him, and this added comedy to their narrative as told in the movie. Before leaving for Adelaide from Canberra, Yuvraj found out that his girlfriend had inadvertently packed his shoes.
‘Where are my shoes?’ I asked her in the morning. She said, ‘I packed them.' I said, ‘How would I get on the bus’? And she said, ‘Wear mine’,” Yuvraj explained. He had to put on her pink slippers for the trip. “I was having my bag hanging in front of my shoes to cover them,” he laughed as he remembered how his team members cheered when they saw him wearing pink slippers.
Yuvraj did not mention the name of the actress but it is speculated that she was Deepika Padukone. His strange real life incidents make an otherwise severe episode of hatred and rivalry in the world of cricket easy to swallow to depict the fact that in spite of the battles there is always an essence of humor to it.
