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My Cricket Hero
Keki Daruwalla on Polly Umrigar Fredun De Vitre on Chandu Borde Gulu Ezekiel on Eknath Solkar Hemant Kenkre on Sunil Gavaskar Amrit Mathur on Salim Durani Kersi Meher-Homji on Vijay Hazare Suresh Menon on G.R. Viswanath Dr Narottam Puri on Kapil Dev Rajdeep Sardesai on Dilip Sardesai Ramesh Sharma on Tiger Pataudi P.R. Man Singh on M.L. Jaisimha Karthik Venkatesh on Mohinder Amarnath
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The Story Of the World's Greatest Batsman
In the thirteen years that he has been in the public eye, Sachin Tendulkar has been explosive on the cricket fieldand Just as reticent off it. He was barely fifteen years old when he first wrote his name into the record books with a stupendous 664-run partnership with his childhood friend Vinod Kambli. Two year later, he struck his first century in first-class cricket. At eighteen, he became the second youngest man to make a hundred in international cricket, and after that there was no looking back. Records tumbled by the wayside as he captivated audiences first in his home city of Mumbai, then in the rest of India and all over the cricket-playing world. Today, Sachin is widely accepted as the world's finest batsman, with impeccable technique, an incredible array of strokes, and maturity far beyond his years. His teammates and friends swear by him, his fans worship him and there are few, if any, critics of his game or his temperamentIn this biography of the hero of Indian cricket, sports writer Gulu Ezekiel mines interviews, press reports and conversations over the last decade to create an accurate and sympathetic account of the man and his first passion: cricket. He tracks Sachin from his childhood when he first caught the bug of cricket, through his early performances in the Ranji Trophy and other domestic tournaments, and follows him on his meteoric rise to international stardom. With unfailing attention to detail, he reconstructs the crucial matches and events that marked Sachin's career and unravels for us the magic of the charismatic cricketer whom Wisden once dubbed 'bigger than Jesus'
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Captain Cool
It must be my power, the bat sped I generate, and the swing of the bat... Mahender Singh Dhoni is as calm and unruffled a sportsman on the field as he is self-effacing off it. But 'brute strength' and 'murderous form' and 'a man possessed' were some of the phrases that came to mind when on 5 April 2005 in Visakhapatnam, he exploded onto international consciousness by becoming the first regular Indian 'keeper to score a one-day century. With his striking form on the day, his long locks visible beneath his helmet, red tints glinting in the sunlight, 'Mahi' Dhoni had transformed from a boy from an obscure small town to a sports legend with the aura of a rock star. And yet Dhoni was no child prodigy, no overnight success. When he made his international debut at 23, he was already mature by Indian cricket standards-with five grinding years of domestic cricket behind him. How that legend came to be- and grew from game to game- is told here by noted sportswriter Gulu Ezekiel in his crackling but measured prose. Captain Cool is the story of M.S. Dhoni, Indian cricket's poster boy; it is also the heartwarming account of the life of a young man who won India the World Twenty20 title but can still tell his throngs of admirers,'I am the same boy from Ranchi'.