'Foreign Coaches Have Their Favourites As Well': Virender Sehwag Highlights Biasness In Indian Team

Former Indian opener Virender Sehwag has opened up on favoritism by both Indian and foreign coaches during his time with the national team. Sehwag revealed that Greg Chappell had promised to make him captain, but found himself out of the team a couple of months later, and that overseas coaches ride a lot on names.

Chappell's tenure as coach was undoubtedly marred by controversies in Indian cricket, with Sourav Ganguly taking potshots at the former Aussie captain on multiple occasions. With Chappell as coach, India exited from the group stages of the 2007 World Cup after humiliating losses to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The 104-Test veteran revealed how the Indian players felt that foreign coaches would be unbiased towards them. However, the 44-year-old cited Chappell's example and highlighted how he was no different than the Indian coaches.

"Those seniors had spent a lot of time with Indian coaches and felt that they had favorites and would show bias towards those players. ‘Jo favourite nahi hota hai uski shamat aa jati hai’ . They believed that if a foreign coach came, he would judge all the players according to how they needed to be judged. But actually, this isn’t true because foreign coaches have their favourites as well. They too see the names… be it Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly or Laxman. When Greg Chappell came the first statement he made was ‘Sehwag will be captain’. In two months… forget captaincy, I was out of the team," Sehwag told SportsNext in an interview.

Virender Sehwag hailed Gary Kirsten's coaching skills:

Sehwag went on to claim that Gary Kirsten's coaching skill stood out as he gave the players the apt amount of practice. He added:

"The best was Gary Kirsten, who would make me play 50 balls and then tell me to go back home or to the hotel. Rahul Dravid would play 200 balls, Tendulkar 300 and Gambhir 400 – he knew how much each player needed to practice."

Under Kirsten, India climbed to number one in Test rankings and lifted the World Cup in 2011.