- Monday, March 10, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
For Sourav Ganguly, it was like riding the time machine. Twenty years ago, the former India cricket captain and the current president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had a memorable experience at the iconic balcony of the Lord’s Cricket Ground. On July 13, Ganguly had taken off his shirt and waved it at England cricketers after his team successfully chased a 320-plus target in the final of the NatWest Series. His act was actually a revenge against something similar that former England captain Andrew Flintoff had done during a tour of India before that series where he took off his shirt after bowling India’s Javagal Srinath out to level a one-day international series.
Rekindling that memory of Ganguly’s iconic celebration which still excites millions of Indian cricket fans, organisers of a Durga Puja in Kolkata, the hometown of the former cricketer, have decided to make a pandal (tent that houses the idol of the goddess) on the theme of the balcony of Lord’s. They invited Ganguly to inaugurate the same and the cricketer-turned-administrator was seen standing at the duplicate balcony and waving, not his shirt but India’s National Flag.
Yeah slow motion hai hota hai…
Game bna kar niyam bhul gye..
But dard bahut jabardast diya gya hai English Cricket ko.lords ke maidan pe…Sourav Ganguly now Dipti
Lagaan ka badla liya gya?? pic.twitter.com/zASASNfcbb
— Chivalry knight (@DesiGodha) September 24, 2022
He praised the idea behind the pandal and jokingly told the organisers not to ask him to do what he had done on the real Lord’s balcony two decades ago.
Lord’s has also been special in the career of Ganguly since he had hit his debut Test hundred there against England in 1996.
