Former Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh is known for his amazing off-spin bowling, as he took 417 Test wickets and 269 ODI wickets for India from 1998 to 2016. He retired from the game in 2021, including the Indian Premier League as well.
However, in an interview with PTI, Harbhajan Singh also revealed his funny side and shared an incident where he and Yuvraj Singh played a prank on Sourav Ganguly, who was the Indian captain in 2005, to offer his resignation on the eve of the Pakistan ODI series at home.
Harbhajan Singh and Yuvraj Singh got fake newspaper clippings made in which Ganguly had lambasted his teammates for partying too much and being irresponsible and distant. The normally unaffected "Prince of Kolkata" was actually shocked by what he saw because the cutouts were so convincing.
"Puri team baithi hui thi (the entire team was sitting) when we created this drama and decided that we would make an April Fool of Dada. Yuvi started it: 'Dada, what is this statement that you have given to the press?' He told him that you had called Yuvi a party animal, Harbhajan ko kisi ki padi nahi hai, Ashish Nehra is also in his own world, and Zaheer Khan also parties a lot.
Dada said, 'When did I say this?' Then we showed those clippings to him and said, 'What is this?" Harbhajan recalled in a podcast interview with PTI.
Before a stunned Ganguly could process anything and say anything, senior players Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid also chimed in to lend credibility to the prank.
"...we had already spoken to the seniors about this. I told Paaji (Tendulkar), 'Paaji, you tell him.' And he said to Dada, 'If you have done this, this is wrong.' Rahul Dravid was also playing along, so he said, 'Dada, this is not done, yaar.' When two senior players said that, Dada thought this must be genuine.
"He said, 'I swear, I didn't do this. I'll give up the captaincy if it's proved that I did this,'" Harbhajan Singh added.
Ganguly's nervousness increased significantly as Harbhajan and a few other players gathered up their uniforms and began to leave the dressing area. Now he was completely in a panic.
"The poor guy... While he was reading them (the newspaper clips), two or three of us picked up our bags and started walking out. Dada came running after us, saying, 'Arre yaar, wait, guys! The match is tomorrow. What are you people doing?” he added.
The act, however, ended before things could become any more complicated, as someone broke character and let out a laugh.
“Poor Dada was the kind of captain whom we could fool that day, but later we felt, 'Yaar, we've really put this decent man through it. ' If it had been some other captain, he would genuinely have made us pick up our bags and told us, 'Get out of here and go home. But he was like a big brother," Harbhajan said with a warm smile.
John Wright, the team's head coach, was busy preparing the fielding cones for practice amid all the anxiety that had built up inside the dressing room. While waiting patiently on the field, the friendly New Zealander wondered what might be preventing his players from playing for so long.
After all, Harbhajan had explicitly instructed him to avoid "the internal matter of the team" this one time, and it was a high-stakes home series against Pakistan.
”John Wright was waiting outside, thinking, 'When are they going to come out? When do I set the field? When do I start getting them to the field?' Fifteen minutes, 20 minutes passed, and the team still hadn't come out. And he just kept waiting while all this drama was going on inside,” Harbhajan said.
Harbhajan said pranks like these are a good way to bond with teammates, share a few laughs, and keep the mood light.
"Because if, in sport, you talk only about cricket, or only about whatever sport it is, the dressing room becomes gloomy and serious. Then the fun goes away. A happy dressing room is a winning dressing room. You come back from the ground, discuss it, and that's it. If you keep thinking about it and carrying on with it, then the atmosphere becomes gloomy. And if you've made the atmosphere like that, what are you going to do when you go back?" he asked.
The philosophy proved true the next day. India defeated Pakistan by 87 runs, with Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid slamming hundreds and Tendulkar picking up a five-wicket haul.
(PTI inputs)
