Bhubaneswar: Head coach of the Indian cricket team Ravi Shastri is in the line of fire for a recent tweet he posted Wednesday. In the tweet, Ravi Shastri has written: “Take a bow Jay Shah, Brijesh Patel, Hemang Amin and the medical staff of the BCCI for pulling off the impossible and making it a dream IPL.
It should be stated here that Jay Shah is the joint secretary of the BCCI, Patel is the chairman of the IPL governing council while Amin is the interim CEO of the board. It is important to note here that Shastri has conveniently forgotten to mention the name of BCCI president Sourav Ganguly in his congratulatory message. The former Indian captain played a very crucial role in taking the IPL to the UAE.
See link for Shastri’s tweet and comments
https://twitter.com/RaviShastriOfc/status/1326225946400198666
Netizens have come down heavily on Shastri for not including Ganguly’s name in the congratulatory message. One use has christened him a ‘Greg Chappell 2.0’ version while another has called Shastri a ‘juvenile’ and said ‘who but a juvenile takes liberties with the universally respected Dada? The man who gave spine to Indian cricket’.
Well Shastri and Ganguly have not been in the best of terms for more than two decades now. He never had a good word to say for Ganguly when the latter was blossoming as a cricketer. However, now Ganguly is the BCCI boss and some have questioned the audacity of Shastri in ‘deliberately’ omitting his name from the tweet.
Others have re-tweeted another tweet by the legendary Aussie leg-spinner Shane Warne. In the tweet, Warne has congratulated Ganguly and the players for a tremendously successful IPL 2020. A few netizens have said Shastri should learn from Warne the reasons how the IPL was successfully conducted and who was the man behind it.
The friction between Ganguly and Shastri came to light in 2016 when Anil Kumble was made the head coach of the Indian team. The selection of the head coach was done by the cricket advisory committee (CAC) comprising of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman. Then Shastri had blamed Ganguly for not getting the coveted post. The latter had retorted by saying it would be ‘foolish’ for Shastri to think that one person single-handedly can influence the panel.
There have been other occasions also when Ganguly and Shastri have had spats that became public. But then Ganguly was not the BCCI president. So Shastri’s latest act has certainly angered a section of the netizens who want him to rectify his mistake immediately.