A video of Sachin Tendulkar meeting Vinod Kambli has gone viral on the internet. Now Sanjay Manjrekar’s three-year-old interview with SportsKeeda is the new talk of the town in the cricketing world.
Manjrekar talked about the relationship between Sachin and Kambli and also talked about ‘the character’ Vinod Kambli and how he behaved during their playing days.
Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli are childhood friends. Both started playing cricket together under their mentor and coach Ramakant Achrekar in Mumbai. There have been quite a few ups and downs in the friendship between Sachin and Kambli throughout these years.
Vinod Kambli had accused Sachin Tendulkar of not helping him during his struggling days in a reality show a few years back. After this incident, Sachin didn’t speak to Kambli for some years and didn’t even invite him to his post-retirement gathering.
Sanjay Manjrekar recalls incidents from 1992 of Vinod Kambli and Sachin Tendulkar
Recalling an incident from the 1992 World Cup, Manjrekar said that he and Sachin were playing matches regularly and Kambli was sitting on the bench. Kambli, after every match would come up to them and tell that they could’ve done better in a particular match.
He said, “This story· is from the 1992 World Cup when Vinod Kambli was in the Indian World Cup team. Kambli is someone you know· is a character and he was very friendly with me and Sachin. In the first few matches of the World Cup, he wasn’t playing. His mood was off; he was a bit upset.
Sachin and I were the two established players so we were getting all the matches. But after every match, when we would meet, he would come after us. He would criticise; ‘What is this batting? You could have played faster. He didn’t even spare Sachin”.
Manjrekar further said, “In a match against Zimbabwe, Sachin and I had a good partnership. It was a small target and we won the match. Despite that, in the evening, Kambli would again go like ‘The match and all is fine; but we could have won it a lot earlier.
He told Sachin, ‘John Traicos is such an ordinary bowler. You could have· hit him out of the ground; you were taking singles’. Sachin said ‘Our target was to win the match’. But Vinod did not learn. If there is one person who could upset Sachin, that is Vinod Kambli”.
