New Delhi: Gautam Gambhir, former India cricketer, has hit back at Pakistan cricketer Shahid Afridi for some of the comments made in his autobiography “Game Changer”. Shahid Afridi, in his autobiography, accused the former India opener of having an “attitude problem” and “no personality” going onto even claim that Gautam Gambhir “has no records just a lot of attitude”. On Saturday, Gautam Gambhir took to Twitter, saying “we are still granting visas to Pakistanis for medical tourism”, even offering to “personally” take Shahid Afridi to a psychiatrist.
@SAfridiOfficial you are a hilarious man!!! Anyway, we are still granting visas to Pakistanis for medical tourism. I will personally take you to a psychiatrist, Gambhir tweeted.
“Some rivalries were personal, some professional. First the curious case of Gambhir. Oh poor Gautam. He and his attitude problem,” Afridi wrote in his book
“He (Gautam) who has no personality. He who is barely a character in the great scheme of cricket. He who has no great records just a lot of attitude.”
“In Karachi we call guys like him saryal (burnt up). Its simple, I like happy, positive people. Doesn’t matter if they are aggressive or competitive, but you have to be positive and Gambhir wasn’t,” he adds.
Gambhir and Afridi don’t see eye to eye, both on and off the field. In 2007, the two players were booked for breaching the ICC Code of Conduct following a clash during an ODI match between India vs Pakistan in Kanpur.
Speaking about the incident, Afridi said, “I remember the run-in with Gambhir during the 2007 Asia Cup, when he completed his single while running straight into me. The umpires had to finish it off or I would have. Clearly we had a frank bilateral discussion about each other’s female relatives.”
Recently, former mental conditioning coach Paddy Upton said Gambhir was “mentally the most insecure, negative and pessimistic” but that did not stop him from becoming one of the most successful batsmen of his generation.
Interestingly, the feisty former opener did not find the assertions hurtful. Gautam Gambhir, who is a now a politician, said that he is confident that there is “no sinful intention in Upton’s views as he is a nice man and in any case his insecurities are well documented”.
In his book ‘The Barefoot Coach’, Upton discussed the mental toughness of elite sportspersons and how they react to situations.
“I did some of my best and least effective mental conditioning work with Gautam Gambhir, the International Test Cricketer of the Year’ in 2009. I worked with him up until that time but I had little to do with him being named world’s best cricketer,” Upton wrote in his book.
