Yuvraj and Harbhajan pulled an April Fools’ prank on Ganguly
The prank was so convincing that Ganguly offered to quit captaincy
Sachin and Dravid also joined the prank, making it even more believable
The prank was meant to trigger a few laughs but the drama in between became so intense that a battle-hardened India captain offered to resign in a state of complete panic.
It was April Fool's Day of 2005, which was also the training day before the start of a one-day series against familiar and bitter foes Pakistan in Kochi.
The burden of expectations was as usual heavy and Yuvraj Singh along with Harbhajan Singh decided that pranking then skipper Sourav Ganguly would be the perfect way to lighten up the dressing room mood.
So, they walked in carrying fake newspaper clippings in which Ganguly had lambasted his teammates for being party animals, irresponsible and distant. The cutouts were so convincing that the usually unfazed 'Prince of Kolkata' was genuinely flabbergasted by what was being shown to him.
"Puri team baithi hui thi (the entire team was sitting) when we created this drama and decided that we will make an April Fool of Dada. Yuvi started it: 'Dada, what is this statement that you have given to the press?' He told him that you have called Yuvi party animal, Harbhajan ko kisi ki padi nahi hai, Ashish Nehra is also in his own world and Zaheer Khan also parties a lot," Harbhajan recalled in a podcast interview with PTI at its headquarters here last week.
"Dada said 'when did I say this?' Then we showed those clippings to him and said, 'What is this?'," said the 46-year-old.
Before a flummoxed Ganguly could process anything, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid joined in to lend credibility that was impossible to refute.
"...we had already spoken to the seniors about this. I told Paaji (Tendulkar), 'Paaji, you tell him'. And he said to 'Dada, if you have done this, this is wrong'. Rahul Dravid was also playing along, so he also said, 'Dada, this is not done, yaar'. When two senior players said that, Dada thought (this must be genuine).
"He said 'I swear, I didn't do this. I'll give up the captaincy if (it's proved that) I did this'." But the lead actors were not done yet. Harbhajan along with a couple of more players picked up their kits and started walking out of the dressing room causing Ganguly's anxiety to shoot up by a few notches. He was now in a full-blown state of panic.
"The poor guy...While he was reading them (the newspaper clips), two or three of us picked up our bags and started walking out. Dada came running after us, saying, 'Arre yaar, wait, guys! The match is tomorrow. What are you people doing?" The act, however, ended before things could any more complicated as someone broke character to let out a laugh.
"Poor Dada was the kind of captain whom we could fool that day, but later we felt, 'Yaar, we've really put this decent man through it.' If it had been some other captain, he would genuinely have made us pick up our bags and told us, 'Get out of here and go home'.
"But he was like a big brother," Harbhajan said with a warm smile on his face as he talked about the man under whom he played some of his memorable cricket.
Wright waited outside
Amid all the drilled up tension inside the dressing room, the team's head coach John Wright was busy setting up the fielding cones for training.
After all it was a high-voltage home series against Pakistan and Harbhajan had also specifically told him to stay away from "the internal matter of the team" this one time.
The amiable New Zealander patiently waited on the field, all the while wondering what could have been keeping his wards from coming out for so long.
"John Wright was waiting outside, thinking, 'When are they going to come out? When do I set the field? When do I start getting them to field?' 15 minutes, 20 minutes passed -- the team still hadn't come out.
"And he just kept waiting, while all this drama was going on inside."
Need to keep dressing room light
Harbhajan said pranks like these are a good way to bond with teammates, share a few laughs with them and keep the mood light.
"Because if, in sport, you talk only about cricket -- or only about whatever sport it is -- the dressing room becomes gloomy, serious. Then the fun goes away. A happy dressing room is a winning dressing room," he said.
"You come back from the ground, discuss it, and that's it. If you keep thinking about it and carrying on with it, then the atmosphere becomes gloomy. And if you've made the atmosphere like that, what are you going to do when you go back?" he asked.
The philosophy proved true the next day.
India defeated Pakistan by 87 runs with Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid slamming hundreds and Tendulkar picking up a fifer.
However, the six-match series was an overall disaster as India lost the plot after winning the first two games to go down 2-4.
