Yuvraj Singh
Man of the Tournament in the recently concluded World Cup , Yuvraj Singh shared his fond memories from the past and let it all come out from his heart at an interview.
On being asked if he remembered anything about his childhood or any mischief he may have played, he said “I remember going to school 6 in the morning . [After] Coming back at 5 in the evening , studying , playing sports, playing cricket in the backyard…by the time I was 10-11 I was playing tennis and roller skating and I was quite brilliant ,till my father came and said that you can’t do this anymore.[ He said] you only have to play cricket and nothing else.”
Yuvraj’s father Yograj Singh himself played for India and on being asked if he remembered anything about his relationship with his father on the field and off the field, he said “[I would ]play with my father, get up in the morning and go for a run with him. He used to be the coach of DAV college then, where I usually got in after school and we used to practice the whole day and play practice matches the whole day. [Used to] come back , sleep in the afternoon , have lunch, go for practice in the evening at the cricket stadium in sector 16. In the night we used to practice with wet tennis balls, because he [my father] knew that in international cricket you have to play pace. So he had a set plan about me and the whole day we used to go about and practice.”
On an anecdote famously discussed about his roller skating he narrates, “I had won a major tournament in skating. I would skate in sector 10 in Chandigarh and it was a fifty round race. I was at the 14th position and I came around from behind to win that race and was very happy to show him [his father] the medal. He through my medal and skates outside the skating rink and said ‘from now on, enough of skating. Skating is a girl’s game and you need to go into boys’.”
If there were any other cricketers who influenced him greatly other than his father, “After my dad I went to a few ‘Bishen Singh Bedi camps’ and Bishen paaji rated me as one of the upcoming youngsters. So from those camps I started to get a lot of confidence. I remember getting my first hundred in his camp in 1993. The only problem was that in those camps you had to run a lot.”
On being asked about the positives of Under 19 cricket that kept him in good stead for an international career, he explains “There was hardly any pressure on us. People hardly ever talked about us at that time. We were like school kids, college boys coming out and playing Under-19. We had a very good coach Mr. Roger Binny, who always gave us a lot of confidence and built on our positives. So we were very lucky to have a guy like him.”
Incidentally Yuvraj Singh was also a part of the under-19 team which won a World Cup. Yuvraj recounts his experience as follows, “ I had a few major knocks in that tournament . I scored a 70 when India was 4 down for 10 against New Zealand on a seaming track. Then I got a 50 off 20 balls against Australia in the semi-finals. I had 12-13 wickets in that tournament. So I had a good tournament.”
Tags: Cricket, ICC Cricket World Cup 2011, India, Interview, World Cup, Yograj Singh, Yuvraj Singh
