‘No one has come to me’ – Sunil Gavaskar takes a dig at modern India batters for having ‘ego’ problems

Former India opener, Sunil Gavaskar is surprised to see that none of the batters from the current Indian team has approached him for guidance. He has always been open and extremely approachable for assistance and the 74-year-old has found some problems in the top order of the team, but he is shocked to see that neither the seniors nor the juniors have approached him for advice.

“If the batters are making the same mistakes over and over again, you need to ask what has happened with your technique. How have you tried to improve the batter? Have you tried to tell him, maybe take a different guard? Don’t take a leg-stump guard, take a middle and off-stump guard. I remember once calling Virender Sehwag out of the blue. He had not been scoring too many runs. I told him,” Gavaskar was quoted as saying in The Indian Express.

Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, and VVS Laxman regularly came to me: Sunil Gavaskar 

“Viru, just try the off-stump guard’. So he asked, ‘Why, Sunny bhai?’ So I told him, ‘Look, you aren’t known for great footwork. What is happening is, sometimes when you are getting out, you are reaching out for the delivery and it makes things difficult for you. So, maybe if you take the off-stump guard, you straight away know that the ball is outside the off-stump’. That is where the coach can come in with his inputs,” the former right-hand batter asserted.

It’s obvious that the Indian batter’s poor batting is caused by a lack of effort and a few technical errors, which makes the Indian batters reluctant to approach Gavaskar for guidance. In November 2021, Mayank Agarwal was the last Indian batter to seek Gavaskar’s advice and requested his advice on different techniques. Since then, it has been incredibly silent, excluding him. Gavaskar underlined that he has no problem supporting the batters, but has limited his support in order to prevent misunderstanding.

“No, no one has come. Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman regularly came to me. And they would approach me with a specific problem and you could tell them something which you had observed. I don’t have an ego about this, I could go and talk to them but since there are two coaches — Rahul Dravid and Vikram Rathore – so sometimes you hold back since you don’t want to confuse them with too much information,” former India captain stated.