The prank was supposed to bring a few laughs to India’s dressing room ahead of a series against Pakistan. Instead, it left captain Sourav Ganguly so worried that he was ready to give up the captaincy.It happened on April Fool’s Day in 2005, a day before India began a one-day series against Pakistan in Kochi. With the pressure of playing their familiar rivals already building, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh decided to play a prank on Ganguly.The two came into the dressing room with fake newspaper clippings carrying made-up statements in which Ganguly had supposedly criticised his teammates for being party animals, irresponsible and distant.The clippings looked convincing enough to leave Ganguly confused.“Puri team baithi hui thi (the entire team was sitting) when we created this drama and decided that we will make an April Fool of Dada. Yuvi started it: ‘Dada, what is this statement that you have given to the press?’ He told him that you have called Yuvi party animal, Harbhajan ko kisi ki padi nahi hai, Ashish Nehra is also in his own world and Zaheer Khan also parties a lot,” Harbhajan recalled in an interview with news agency PTI.“Dada said ‘when did I say this?’ Then we showed those clippings to him and said, ‘What is this?’,” said the 46-year-old.The prank then got help from two senior members of the team, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. They had been brought into the plan beforehand and played along, making Ganguly believe the reports were genuine.“…we had already spoken to the seniors about this. I told Paaji (Tendulkar), ‘Paaji, you tell him’. And he said, ‘Dada, if you have done this, this is wrong’. Rahul Dravid was also playing along, so he also said, ‘Dada, this is not done, yaar’. When two senior players said that, Dada thought (this must be genuine).“He said ‘I swear, I didn’t do this. I’ll give up the captaincy if (it’s proved that) I did this’.”The pranksters then took things further. Harbhajan and two or three other players picked up their bags and started walking out of the dressing room.“While he was reading them (the newspaper clips), two or three of us picked up our bags and started walking out. Dada came running after us, saying, ‘Arre yaar, wait, guys! The match is tomorrow. What are you people doing?”The prank finally ended when one of the players broke character and laughed.“Dada was the kind of captain whom we could fool that day, but later we felt, ‘Yaar, we’ve really put this decent man through it.’ If it had been some other captain, he would genuinely have made us pick up our bags and told us, ‘Get out of here and go home’.“But he was like a big brother,” Harbhajan said with a warm smile as he recalled the captain under whom he played some of his memorable cricket.
