Sunil Gavaskar, born on 10 July 1949, in Bombay [now Mumbai],
India, is an Indian cricket player who is
considered one of the sport’s greatest opening batsmen of all time. Gavaskar
skilfully captained the Indian team in 47 Test (international) matches and
dominated the game during a career that spanned 16 years and 125 total Test
contests.
Gavaskar was instigated into playing cricket in
Bombay under the guidance of his Test-playing uncle, Madhav Mantri. Gavaskar’s
impressive performance in domestic cricket soon attracted national notice, and
he was selected for the extremely tough tour of the West Indies in 1971. Not
only on that tour—when he scored 774 runs—but also in subsequent tours,
Gavaskar was the one batsman the fearsome West Indian bowlers could never
suppress. His world record of 34 Test centuries (100 runs in a single innings) stood
for 19 years until it was broken by his countryman, Sachin Tendulkar in 2005.
Just 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 metres) tall, Gavaskar was a master of short-pitched
bowling; very few fast bowlers could claim to have completely dominated him.
Gavaskar went on to break many records, setting his
own long-standing Indian Test record of 236 not out (subsequently broken by
Tendulkar). He is also the only Indian to have scored two centuries in a Test
match on three occasions. A superb driver and cutter of the ball, Gavaskar was
the first player to score 10,000 runs in Test matches. He was also an excellent
fielder, with 108 catches during his career; he was the first Indian apart from
wicket keepers to reach the landmark of 100 catches.
After his retirement in 1987, Gavaskar put his immense
cricketing acumen to great use as a popular columnist for some of the
leading Indian newspapers and magazines and as a widely respected television
commentator. He was inducted into the International Cricket Council’s Hall of
Fame in 2009.
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