Sunil Gavasker history

Sunil Manohar Gavaskar pronunciation (born July 10, 1949 at Bombay, Maharashtra), nicknamed Sunny, was a cricket player during the 1970s and 1980s for Bombay and India. He is considered one of the greatest opening batsmen in the history of the sport.He made a spectacular Test debut in 1971 scoring 774 runs in his first Test series against the West Indies helping India to become one of the few teams to defeat the West Indies at home in the Caribbean. Gavaskar went on to average a mammoth 70.20 runs per innings in the West Indies throughout his career - a feat no batsman in his era was able to surpass consistently. From then until his retirement in 1987 he was a mainstay of the Indian batting line-up.In 1983 Gavaskar broke one of the oldest and most prestigious records in the game: Donald Bradman's total of 29 Test centuries. Gavaskar was the holder of the record for the most number of Test centuries (34) until 2003 when his countryman Sachin Tendulkar broke that record. Gavaskar was the only player to score centuries in each innings, three times (Ricky Ponting equalled this record against South Africa in 2003). He was also the first batsman to reach 10,000 Test runs and held the record for the most number of runs until it was broken by Allan Border.Gavaskar failed to carry over his success as a Test batsman to the ODI format. He could not adjust to the pace required in an ODI, and struggled throughout his career. In one of his notorious ODI performances in 1975, he scored 36 not out off 174 balls as an opener with just one Four in reply to England's 334 in 60 overs. Indian team's total contribution turned out to be 132 for 3 in 60 overs. It was alleged that Gavaskar deliberately performed poorly in that match, due to his annoyance with the promotion of Srinivas Venkataraghavan to captaincy. He later claimed that he could not adjust to the pace of the game.In 1981, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, when Gavaskar was given out by the Australian umpire Rex Whitehead, he ordered his fellow opener Chetan Chauhan to quit the match [3]. Instead of abandoning the match, the Indian manager, SK Durani persuaded Chauhan to return to the match which India went on to win by 59 runs as Australia collapsed to 83 in their second innings.