Salil Ankola, ex-India pacer who played alongside Sachin Tendulkar, reveals his misery with national team – Firstcricket News, Firstpost

Former Mumbai and India fast bowler Salil Ankola revealed some gloomy chapters of his cricketing career and the problems he faced during his short stint with the Indian national team.

Salil, a right-arm fast bowler, played one Test match and 20 ODIs for India from 1989 to 1997. He also picked 181 wickets playing first-class cricket for Mumbai and Maharashtra back in the day. In fact, he marked his debut for Maharashtra in 1988 with a hat-trick.

He was considered to be one of the finest quick around the Mumbai cricketing circle and was selected for the national side after less than a year of his Ranji Trophy debut. However, he was mostly left out to carry drinks.

“There were times I would be dropped from the Indian team and get picked for India A, only to be carrying drinks there as well,” Ankola told Cricbuzz.

Ankola played at a time when India had some fast bowling stalwarts in the side. Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar retired in the mid-1990s. Whereas the likes of Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, and Ajit Agarkar were the front runners towards the late 90s and early 2000s. There was a brief window of opportunity for him amidst other bowlers, but Ankola’s knee injury ended his hopes of a longer stint with the national side.

The situations that he went through led him to despise the game of cricket. He isolated himself from cricket for almost two decades, making the 2011 World Cup final an exception. He had a soft corner for Sachin Tendulkar, with whom he made his debut in 1989 and hence couldn’t skip the World Cup final.

“From 2001 onwards, I was totally off cricket. One big mistake I did in 2001 was that Sony offered me a job in cricket and I refused. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I took such a stupid decision, but I just refused. Maybe I was so put off by cricket that I stopped watching the game.

“In 2011, when India reached the final, I stayed awake to watch the match. Sachin holds a special place in my life, and I knew that it was going to be his last World Cup. Even though by then, I didn’t even know who the players were in the Indian team, I wanted to watch the match and it was going to go on till late in the night – I don’t know where we were playing, but I remember staying awake, watching the match, watching him win the World Cup,” Ankola explained.

Ankola was also in a dire state after 2004 as he started abusing alcohol and had to join a rehabilitation program. However, the times have changed since then and he was appointed as the chief selector of Mumbai in 2021.

Ankola realised after January 2020 that he wanted to be associated with cricket and made a phone call to the Mumbai Cricket Association President Vijay Patil. “I was almost 52 then. Once you cross 50, your perception changes… Like my example of not wanting to go back to cricket. But in the bargain, I was actually missing cricket.”

Tendulkar also offered a role to Ankola, but he refused the position. “I wanted to come back as a coach. But when I had a look at what the scenario was, I realised coaching was not my cup of tea. Coaching in the 1990s and coaching now, there is a zameen-aasman ka farak (a massive difference).

“I had even enrolled at NCA as a Level 2 coach, but then I wrote to Rahul [Dravid] and said that I won’t be able to come because I don’t see myself as a coach. I don’t have so much patience, I’m a very short-tempered guy.”

Interestingly, Salil Ankola’s selection panel picked Mumbai’s Vijay Hazare-winning squad in 2020-2021 season.

Akola continues to hold Mumbai’s chief-selector position and the betterment of Mumbai cricket is the only agenda in his mind as he had expressed on his retainment as the chief selector in June 2021.

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