Gowtham’s dream comes true
The father of Team India’s newest player, K. Gowtham, speaks to us on his call into the Indian Team
The 33-year-old bowling allrounder Krishnappa Gowtham is one of the five new faces included in the Indian team for the forthcoming tour of Sri Lanka (the other four being Devdutt Padikkal, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Nitish Rana and Chetan Sakariya). Interestingly, Gowtham, who’d earlier this year become the most expensive uncapped Indian player for the IPL — bought at a record sum of `9.25 crore by the Chennai Super Kings for the upcoming season of the tournament —had started playing cricket without the knowledge of his father.
“I never wanted him to be a cricketer,” says M. Krishnappa, Gowtham’s father, speaking exclusively over the telephone from the farmhouse, about 160 km from Bangalore. Krishnappa, incidentally, was a Kabaddi player in the Karnataka State team. The dad explains why he was not keen on his son following a path into playing cricket, a game Krishnappa admits he was ‘allergic’ to. “Gowtham was not good in his academics and I wanted him to concentrate on education rather than on playing cricket. Nevertheless, I never knew he had been practising hard in school,” he says.
THE GAME CHANGER
Then, one day, Gowtham brought home a newspaper in which his name was mentioned on a sports page that hailed his performance in one of their school matches. “I simply dismissed the whole thing saying it was some other K. Gowtham, but that’s when he and his mother Nalina Yadav showed me his full cricket kit, which they had been hiding from me for two whole years,” adds Krishnappa with a chuckle.
Earlier, speaking to this reporter about his inclusion in the Indian team for the Sri Lanka tour, a rather confident Gowtham had said, “It’s my dream coming true. To be honest, though, my selection in the Indian team has not surprised me. After performing well in recent times, I was expecting my inclusion. And while it will be in the hands of the team management to make me play in the final eleven I know I will give my 100% if I am given the chance.”