Picture Credit: X
Gautam Gambhir, the former India and Kolkata Knight Riders captain, shared a hilarious story from the IPL 2014 season involving Ashish Nehra in a podcast interview. The 42-year-old revealed that his former India teammate ordered a duck for him for dinner after his bad start to the IPL season for KKR nearly a decade ago, scoring three back-to-back ducks.
Also Read: No one can come and walk over my players: Gambhir opens up on Virat Kohli-Naveen-ul Haq controversy
But, despite a horror beginning to the IPL 2014 season, Gautam Gambhir managed to get back into form with the bat, scoring 335 runs in 16 innings at an average of 22.33 and a strike-rate of 114.33 with three fifties. Most importantly, he led Kolkata Knight Riders to their second IPL title in three years, defeating the Punjab Kings, then known as Kings XI Punjab, by three weeks at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru.
During an ANI podcast, Gautam Gambhir narrated the incident during the early stages of the IPL 2014, stating that Ashish Nehra ordered a duck for him for dinner and told him to eat it, otherwise, he would score a fourth consecutive duck during the tournament for KKR. He was quoted as saying, “Four or five guys from Delhi were sitting together at the dinner table. Ashish Nehra ordered a duck. He told me to have the duck for dinner; otherwise, I might get another duck in the next match. I just tasted it. I scored one run in that match, and Nehra even messaged me after that.”
Shah Rukh Khan told Gautam Gambhir to not drop himself after scoring three consecutive ducks in IPL 2014
After scoring three consecutive ducks in the IPL 2014 for Kolkata Knight Riders, Gautam Gambhir spoke to the team owner, Shah Rukh Khan, about dropping from the playing XI, but the Bollywood superstar didn’t agree with him. He said, “2014 in Abu Dhabi, I started the IPL with three ducks in a row. I got a one in the fourth game. We had lost four out of our first five matches. We were coming back to Ritz Carlton after we lost the game. He (Shah Rukh Khan) was standing in the lobby. He took me on the side and asked what was happening. I said I was thinking of dropping myself."
“He told me, 'till you are there and you want to be there, you are not dropping yourself.' He asked me to promise him that I would play every game until I was there. I got two or three half-centuries in a row and we won in 2014. That was my only cricket conversation with him in seven years of my captaincy,” added Gautam Gambhir.
