Cheteshwar Pujara retired from all forms of cricket on Sunday morning, pulling curtains on a career that saw him score 7,195 runs for India in 103 Tests, besides also playing in five ODIs for the Men in Blue. In First Class cricket, Pujara was a colossus, scoring 21,301 runs in 278 matches with a highest score of 352 runs.
The agony of being on the receiving end of a Pujara triple century was recently revealed by India Test captain Rohit Sharma when he was at an event to launch Puja Pujara’s book called ‘The Diary of a Cricketer’s Wife: A Very Unusual Memoir Book’.
Rohit Sharma said that he had first experienced the force that was Pujara in his u-14 cricketing days. The Saurashtra batter left a mark on Sharma — literally! — in their early days.
“When I was 14 years old, I remember coming home in the evening after playing cricket, and my face used to look totally different. I’ll tell you the reason: he used to bat the whole day, and we would also be fielding in the sun for two or three days straight,” Rohit Sharma had said.
Rohit Sharma’s first impressions of Pujara
Sharma added: “I still remember, my mom asked me two or three times, ‘When you leave home to play, you look different, but when you return after a week or ten days, you look completely changed.’ I told her, ‘Mummy kya karu? Pujara karke ek batsman hai, woh teen din tak batting karta hai. Aur hum teeno din fielding kar rahe the!’ (Mom, what can I do? There’s this batsman named Cheteshwar Pujara. He kept batting for three days, and we were just stuck fielding all three days!)’ That was the first impression we had of him. Until then, we had only heard that there’s this player called Cheteshwar Pujara, and if we don’t get him out quickly, we’re going to suffer on the field the entire day.”
The Saurashtra batter had once scored a triple hundred for Saurashtra against Baroda in their West Zone Under-14 clash.
Cheteshwar Pujara announced his retirement from all forms of Indian cricket on Sunday. (BCCI)
Sharma said that the Saurashtra cricketer and he had spent almost 70 percent of their cricketing life together on the field, so they knew each other very well. He also revealed that in younger domestic cricket days, they used to have entire team meetings that revolved around getting Pujara out in his younger days.
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“We used to have team meetings that revolved only around him. ’How do we get him out?’ Because if we didn’t, we knew we would probably lose the game,” Sharma added.
When Pujara got mugged in West Indies
Sharma also revealed that once during a India A tour of West Indies, Pujara had been mugged when he went out of the hotel at night ignoring the advice of the other players like Sharma.
“We were in Trinidad and Tobago, and one night I went out with one of the physios. I’m a vegetarian, so we were trying to find a place that served vegetarian food. It was late—around 11 pm. We didn’t find any food, and while walking back, I was suddenly mugged,” the Saurashtra cricketer said.
He paused, careful with his words. “I don’t want to go into too many details, but yes, I was mugged.”
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Sharma quickly jumped in with the moral of the story: “Sometimes he can be stubborn. We told him—don’t step out after 9 pm. This isn’t India, this is the West Indies. But he went anyway… and that’s what happened.”
