The battle between Indian batting great Sachin Tendulkar and Australian spin legend Shane Warne was one of the best sporting spectacles in the 1990s and early 2000s.
While both of them were fierce competitors on the field, they share a healthy camaraderie outside the 22-yard.
Recently, Tendulkar recalled a funny anecdote while having dinner with Warne in Mumbai. The batting maestro shared the story in a new documentary called ‘Shane’.
Before the first Test of the 1998 series in Chennai, the Australia team played a first-class match against Mumbai and it was then Tendulkar invited Warne for dinner.
“We were in Mumbai and I asked him, why don’t you come over for a meal. I asked him what would you like? Do you like Indian food? He said, ‘oh, I love it’. I asked anything specific – spicy, less spicy? But he said he’ll have whatever we cooked at home, authentic Indian style,” Tendulkar said in the documentary.
“I took a bite of the chicken and nearly blew my head off,” Warne said.
Tendulkar then opened up on Warne’s tricks to escape the spicy chicken that evening.
“When I was busy serving other people of the table, I noticed that Shane kept nudging my manager all the time. Eventually my manager told me that Shane hasn’t eaten anything yet. But I saw his plate was half empty but my manager told me that while I was busy serving other, Shane was busy putting everything on my manager’s plate. That’s when I realized that Shane cannot handle spicy food,” he said.
“I had too much respect for Sachin and his family, they had gone through the trouble of a lovely meal,” Warne said.
Tendulkar further disclosed that Warne was in his kitchen cooking up sausages after that dinner meeting.
“By the end of that evening, Shane went into the kitchen and he was cooking sausages, beans and mashed potatoes and ended up eating those things,” Sachin said.
Sachin Tendulkar finished the 1998 Test series against Australia as the top run-getter, scoring 446 runs at an average of 111.5 with two hundreds and 1 fifty as India won the three-match series 2-1.
On the other hand, Warne returned with 10 wickets from the three Tests.
(With ZeeNews inputs)
