I am writing this blog on ddca purely bcz of my love for cricket as i have been following it for last 20 yrs..from 1996 WC to be more precise. Yes the time when Team India was flooded with the Mumbaikars. The God Sachin TendulKAR, Manoj prabhakar, sanjay manjerekar, ajit Agarkar, salil ankola, abey kuruvilla, vinod kambli, neelesh kulkarni, wasim jafer,Sameer Sidhe all these played for team india during 1995-2000.
If we talk about the duration between 1985-1996 again all we will see is Mumbaikars all over the team India. Sunil gavaskar, ravi shastri, vengsarkar, praveen amre, sachin, kambli, manjerekar were there in team. If we talk about past veenu mankad, vijay merchant, ajit vadekar, dileep sardesai, balvinder Sandhu, chandu borde , eknath solkar, pauli umrigar, farooq engineer. Frankly speaking i dont remember any delhi cricketer name representing team India except Madan lal and chetan chauhan.
Surprisingly all these players emerged to the national origin well before Jaitley took over as DDCA cheif. And we hardly remember any delhi based cricketer from the past. I don't want to go to the politics of the allegations but we need to see what actually happened in ddca to decide how was Arun Jaitley's tenure.
Let us see how many cricketers came to the national horizon in those 15 years of Jaitley tenure. 1)Veerendra sehwag (2001-02)was probably the first cricketing legend emerged from ddca. 2)Ashish nehra(2001-02) came to the side almost at the same time as veeru did. Veeru's long term opening partner in test Aakash Chopra(3) also came to the side in 2003. Amit mishra (4) made his debut in 2004 in bangladesh and so did Amit Bhandari (5) he couldn't become a regular though. Then came the time of renovation of DDCA so it couldn't produce much players till 2007. Although the fighting Gautam Gambhir(6) somehow managed to impress the selectors and became a regular by 2008. 2008 reminds me of the revival of Indian cricket and its emergence to the top of all three formats and the Delhi boys Veeru, Gauti and Ishant Sharma(7) played a vital role in this. Talking about ishant; who can forget his spell to Ricky Ponting in that 2008 Australian tour. In 2008 As Shikhar Dhawan (8) was toiling hard in domestic cricket another Delhi lad and DDCA product made news for all the good reasons. Virat Kohli(9) led India under'19 team to the wc triumph in 2008. And these were probably the best time of Indian cricket as team Indian ruled world cricket from September 2007 to april 2011. Team India won the t20 WC in 07, won under'19 WC in 2008, became no.1 test and one day side by the end of 2009 and remained at top till 2011 WC. Team India had as many as 4 DDCA products in WC'11 winning team with veeru, gauti,kohli and nehra all making important contribution in the triumph. In came 2012 and the under'19 WC also comes home with another DDCA product Unmukt Chand (10) leading the team.
So if we summarise it all we will see 10 DDCA cricketers made it to Team India in 13 years of Arun Jaitley's tenure more than any other state team. 3 out of last 4 of Team India's regular captains are from Delhi i.e. Veeru,Gauti, Kohli with MSD being the only Non Delhi Captain
4 out of last 5 of our regular test openers are also DDCA products i.e. Akash chopra, veeru, gauti and shikhar Dhawan
2 out of 3 of our under'19 WC winning captains are also from DDCA i.e. Virat kohli and unmukt chand with Kaif being the 3rd
So Arun Jaitley actually did was he broke the monopoly of mumbai in team India with ddca and upca being the top two state boards considering the number of players making it to Team India. So Jaitley's tenure as DDCA president was more than awesome atleast from cricketing point of view.
