NEWS
Follow UsIt would be hard to imagine MS Dhoni, the greatest cricket captain the Indian cricket team has seen in history, letting someone else lead him at the peak of his career, that too for Jharkhand, his home team, he knew inside out. But it happened, and it was none other than a pacer–Varun Aaron, who led Dhoni in a Vijay Hazare Trophy game in 2017.
Aaron, in an interview with Cricket.com, recently revealed how nervous he was leading the man who by then had achieved everything that was there to be achieved in cricket in terms of leading India to number in Test rankings, winning the T20 World Cup, ODI World Cup and the Champions Trophy.
“It was weird to start with because I was being captained by him in the national team. So I was like, ‘Do you want me to captain the side or do you want to do your thing?’ and then he was like, ‘Look I have come in after many years and I don’t know the boys.
"Until and unless I know what their capabilities are, their pluses, their minuses, it’s going to be hard for me to captain them,” Aaron said in the latest episode of Unwind.
Aaron, who has played nine Tests and nine ODIs for the national team, was amongst the stream of cricketers that graduated to the national set-up from Jharkhand after Dhoni put the state on the cricketing map of India.
An alumnus from the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai, the 34-year-old considers himself a pan-India product with a mother hailing from Goa, a father who is Tamilian from Chikmaglauru, and both working in Jamshedpur. His father briefly worked in Pune as well.
Aaron started training at the age of 14 in Chennai and was mentored by Dennis Lillee. He also worked as a consultant at the same academy before quitting and starting a restaurant in Bengaluru, which he runs with his sister as the main chef.
Aaron, who hit Stuart Broad with a bouncer that broke the England batter's nose, said that he was not very proud of that.
"One of your jobs being a fast bowler is to intimidate the batters. The plan was always to bowl bouncers. But when I was bowling from around the wicket, he was picking it up and hitting sixes on the shorter side. I know that when I bowl my bouncers over the wicket to the left-handers, it is really effective. So I bowled one of those again and it beat his deneces, took a slight edge and barred into the gap between his helmet grill," explained the Jharkhand speedster.
Aaron, who is now settled in Bengaluru, also talked about the IPL fan following and why the RCB fans are most loyal. Catch the full interview by clicking on the YouTube link above or visiting cricket.com.
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