🏏Sourav Ganguly

📖In detail

Born in Kolkata on 8 July 1972, Sourav Ganguly is credited with uniting the Indian team and teaching it to win, at home and abroad. He first joined the team in 1992, but when he returned in 1996 he scored a century on Test debut at Lord's, followed by another in the next Test.

The left-hander took over the captaincy in 2000, when the match-fixing scandal had shaken Indian cricket, and went on to become one of India's most successful captains: India won 21 of 49 Tests and 76 of 146 ODIs under him, and reached the final of the 2003 World Cup. He never backed down from a fight and answered rivals in their own style.

Before retiring from international cricket in 2008, he scored 7,212 runs in 113 Tests at an average of 42.17 and 11,363 runs in 311 ODIs at 41.02, with 16 Test and 22 ODI centuries. With Sachin Tendulkar he formed one of the most explosive opening pairs in ODI cricket. He later served as president of the BCCI from 2019 to 2022.