As the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), former team India skipper Sourav Ganguly has a number of responsibilities, which include the development of both men’s and women’s cricket. While he and the board members are currently involved in a major controversy regarding the ODI captaincy of Virat Kohli, an old video has resurfaced on social media where Ganguly can be heard saying that “girls don’t need to play cricket.” In the interview aired on the Bengali news channel ‘ABP Ananda’, the host and Ganguly were talking about Sachin Tendulkar’s son Arjun playing cricket. This is when the host asked Ganguly what would be his reaction if his daughter Sana says she wants to play cricket. To this, Ganguly said, “Ami Sana ke baaron korbo. Meyeder cricket khelaar dorkaar nei (I’ll ask Sana not to because girls don’t need to play cricket.”
Ganguly’s comments resurface at a time when women’s cricket is booming in India and more and more young girls are taking inspiration from players such as Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur to name a few.
The above-discussed segment can be heard when skipped to 57:30 of the video.
On Thursday, Ganguly finally responded to Virat Kohli’s explosive press conference where he talked about his sacking as ODI captain and contradicted BCCI President’s comments. Kohli was sacked as ODI captain, earlier this month, and the day after that Ganguly claimed that BCCI had asked Kohli to not quit the T20I captaincy in September and the selectors had to drop him from the 50-overs captaincy as they want a single captain for white-ball formats. While Kohli had, however, contradicted Ganguly’s statement during his explosive press conference on Wednesday ahead of departure for the South Africa Test series.
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The press conference has put the BCCI under the scanner as the cricket board and president are blamed for handling Kohli’s sacking in a poor way.
Ganguly refused to make any comment on the whole saga and told News18: “I have no comment to make. BCCI will deal with it appropriately.”
Meanwhile, on Friday, Kohli stated that the selectors informed him about his removal from ODI captaincy 90 minutes before the Test team’s selection for the South Africa tour.
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