By BIPIN DANI
Despite winning the Player of the match award for his superb hundred in the IPL match, Ruturaj Gaikwad’s parents in Pune were disappointed like any other CSK fans.
“The game of cricket has won and not my son”, Dashrath Gaikwad, the father says.
On Saturday, Ruturaj, the product of former India captain Dilip Vengsarkar’s academy, scored his very first hundred in the T-20 match against Rajasthan Royals.
Look at the timing. He was on 95 before the last ball he faced. At one stage, it looked the other batsman Ravindra Jadeja would steal the show but destiny then was on Rutu’s side. One of his five sixes was the longest (108 meters) in this year’s IPL.
“Yes, we were a little tense till the last ball was bowled to him but were also confident about him completing the century. Had he not scored, would have no regrets. The only regret now is that our son’s hundred was not enough to win the match”, the father added.
“Would’ve loved to be on the winning side, maybe next time”, the father echoed his son’s views.
The man who stole Ruturaj Gaekwad’s effort was Rajasthan Royals’ Vaishnavi Jaiswal, whose entry into the game of cricket has come from a very poor family background.
At the age of ten, Jaiswal, the fourth of their six children of his parents, moved to Dadar, Mumbai, to receive cricket training at Azad Maidan. As Dadar was far away from the Maidan, he relocated to Kalbadevi neighborhoods where he was given accommodation in a dairy shop in return for low-grade work. He was eventually ejected by the shopkeeper as he was unable to provide much help at the shop in between his cricket training.
Having no place of his own, Jaiswal stayed in a tent with the grounds-man at the Maidan, where he often slept hungry and sold pani-puri to make two ends meet.
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