In order to overcome the fear of failures, especially while tackling express fast bowling, Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) batsman Nitish Rana revealed apart from working extremely hard over his game, he has been listening to lectures from popular motivational speaker Mike Horn.
Besides working with the 2011 World Cup-winning Indian side, Horn had also helped Germany come out triumphant at the 2014 football World Cup.
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“I have been following Mike Horn on Instagram for a long time, even before I joined KKR,” Rana was quoted as saying at kkr.in.
“I looked up to him (Horn) and often wondered how he managed to do so many things. When I was young, I used to get scared of pace and had doubts if I could ever face 140-plus kph fast bowling."
“When I personally met him and attended his lectures, I realised he was just not afraid of failures. He knows only how to gain (from them). I tried to absorb this quality from him. If you take up anything with this mindset that you have nothing to lose, you can only gain and perform better.”
Rana joined the KKR set-up ahead of IPL 2018 when his idol, the team's former skipper Gautam Gambhir moved on to spent his final IPL year with the Delhi franchise.
The 26-year also talked about one of the biggest moments of his career so far, which was to captain Gambhir while playing for Delhi.
“When I stayed, everyone said I could mimic cricketers’ actions really well. So people started saying, ‘Act like dada, act like dada’, so playing like him in my early days, copying his style back then, Ganguly’s style got ingrained in my game,” Rana said.
“But when I started playing seriously then it was Gambhir, because I grew up watching him bat from close quarters at the club. So just from seeing him bat in the flesh, I have picked up a lot from him.”
“I don’t think our batting styles match, but people say that. And even if they say that, I have absolutely no problem with that because I have witnessed his batting so much from such close quarters for the last 12 years, that if there’s even a little glimpse of him in me, I will consider myself lucky.”
Gambhir, being a very selfless cricketer as he was, encouraged Rana after quitting Delhi's captaincy.
“If you ask me about the biggest achievement of my career, I will say it was being appointed Delhi captain," said Rana. "The best feeling was to see Gambhir playing his last year (of domestic cricket) while I was captain. I played my first year under him and he played his last year under me."
"Gambhir had said that I was the right candidate to lead Delhi. Imagine such statements coming from your idol. This had to be one of the biggest moments of my life."
In IPL, while Knight Riders have always looked upto Rana as a batsman, he says one his most satisfying game was when he got the wickets of Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers against Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) with his part-time spin bowling.
“My favourite Knight Riders match is my debut match – against RCB – when I got Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers out in one over. Made 34 too in our win,” Rana said.
“I was out that day playing a poor shot, and Dinesh Karthik told me that day that if you want to be a big player, you need to finish games, and that has stayed with me. It was an important game for me, coming into a brand-new side, that performance was comforting," he added.
(Inputs from PTI)
