Sourav Ganguly presided over one of Indian cricket’s most celebrated dressing rooms, building a side that combined a fiercely competitive streak with a group of personalities unafraid to have fun at their captain’s expense. Harbhajan Singh has now recalled one such episode when an April Fool’s prank involving Yuvraj Singh, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid became so convincing that Ganguly was prepared to give up the India captaincy.
The incident occurred during India’s 2005 home series against Pakistan, with the players deciding to target Ganguly ahead of an ODI. What began as an elaborate dressing-room joke quickly became serious for the captain once some of the team’s senior-most figures joined the act. “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 an interview with PTI.
The players had even prepared fake newspaper clippings carrying the supposed comments, leaving Ganguly scrambling to understand when he had criticised his own teammates publicly. “Dada said ‘when did I say this?’ Then we showed those clippings to him and said, ‘What is this?’”
Tendulkar and Dravid make Ganguly believe the prank
For the plan to work, however, Ganguly needed to believe that the allegations were genuine. That was where Tendulkar and Dravid entered the picture. Harbhajan revealed that the senior players had already been briefed and were asked to confront their captain rather than rescue him from the joke. “…we had already spoken to the seniors about this. I told Paaji (Tendulkar), ‘Paaji, you tell him’. And he said, ‘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).”
With Tendulkar and Dravid apparently questioning him as well, Ganguly became convinced that the situation had turned serious. His response showed just how strongly he wanted to clear his name. “He said ‘I swear, I didn’t do this. I’ll give up the captaincy if I did this.’”
The prank did not stop there. As Ganguly examined the clippings, a few players pretended they had had enough and began leaving the dressing room with their bags. “While he was reading them, 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?’”
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Eventually, someone broke character, and the truth emerged. Harbhajan admitted that the players subsequently felt guilty about how far they had pushed a captain who had treated them more like younger brothers than subordinates. “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, summing up a relationship that allowed one of Indian cricket’s most powerful captains to become the unsuspecting victim of one of its most elaborate dressing-room pranks.