‘I even have a photo with Sachin Sir and Glenn Maxwell…was throwing balls to them during their practice’: Shubman Gill recalls | Cricket News

Gujarat Titans skipper Shubman Gill would recall how Sachin Tendulkar had inspired him to be a cricketer and how his father Lakhwinder Singh was Sachin’s biggest fan. The 25-year-old would also narrate how he had taken a photo with Sachin and Australian cricketer Glenn Maxwell in the early years of the Indian Premier League when they came to practice at the Tau Devi Lal Stadium which is on the outskirts of Chandigarh.
“I remember attending three to four matches with my father at the Tau Devi Lal Stadium in Panchkula. In the second or third year of the IPL, Mumbai Indians came there for practice. I was around nine or ten years old at the time. I even have a photo with Sachin Sir and Glenn Maxwell. I was throwing balls to them during their practice,” Gill said speaking on JioHotstar show Superstars.
“These are some of my earliest memories of the IPL. I was extremely nervous, but I already knew about Sachin Sir. He was the reason I started playing cricket. My father is his biggest fan. Though my dad never had much interest in posters, we had Sachin’s posters in our village,” Gill added.
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Exquisite timing
Lakhwinder Gill took his seven-year-old son, Shubman, to the nearest cricket academy from his home in Mohali. Sukhwinder Tinku, a former India under-19 cricketer, recalls the young trainee making an instant impact on him. The exquisite timing caught Tinku’s eye and it reminded him of left-handed Brian Lara, who troubled him a lot during the 1988 Youth World Cup.
“He was the youngest in my academy. The timing of his shots was so good that out of curiosity, I called him up to check his bat,” Tinku told this publication once.
What Tinku found was extraordinary. “It was a wooden bat, not the one you get from the shops. His father has made one for him. Six inches from the bottom, there was a ball-sized hole in his bat. It left me awestruck. I was speechless. Lakhwinder then revealed that he made Shubman play 500 to 700 balls every day,” recalled Tinku.