‘Together, we could control Indian cricket for years’, the Australian told Tendulkar during a visit to his home when he offered to ‘help me in taking over the reins of the side’ from Dravid, the master batsman writes in his autobiography due for release on Thursday.
Tendulkar is scathing in his criticism of Chappell who was the national coach from 2005 to 2007, describing him as a ‘ringmaster who imposed his ideas on the players without showing any signs of being concerned about whether they felt comfortable or not’.
Elaborating on the coach’s bid to replace Dravid, Tendulkar writes, ‘Just months before the World Cup, Chappell had come to see me at home and, to my dismay, suggested that I should take over the captaincy from Rahul Dravid.
‘Anjali (Tendulkar’s wife), who was sitting with me was equally shocked to hear him say that ‘together, we could control Indian cricket for years’, and that he would help me in taking over the reins of the side. I was surprised to hear the coach not showing the slightest amount of respect for the captain, with cricket’s biggest tournament just months away’, Tendulkar writes.
He says that he had rejected Chappell’s proposition outright. ‘He stayed for a couple of hours, trying to convince me before finally leaving’.
So disgusted was Tendulkar with Chappell’s suggestion that a few days after the episode ‘I suggested to the BCCI that the best option would be to keep Greg back in India and not send him with the team to the World Cup’. Tendulkar had suggested to the board senior players could take control of the side and keep the team together. ‘That is not what happened, of course, and the 2007 campaign ended in disaster’, he writes in the book, excerpts of which were made available exclusively to PTI by publishers Hachette India. Tendulkar cites the coach’s attitude towards Sourav Ganguly which he describes as ‘astonishing’. ‘Frankly, Sourav is one of the best cricketers India has produced and he did not need favours from Chappell to be part of the team,’ he writes.