🇮🇳 Sunil Gavaskar

Sunil Gavaskar was born in Bombay on 10 July 1949 to Manohar Gavaskar, a club cricketer, and Meenal, who, in a story Gavaskar tells in his memoir Sunny Days, noticed a moment after his birth that the baby she had been handed had no mole on his left earlobe — the unmistakable family mark her son had carried in the delivery room. A nurse, alerted, found that two babies had been swapped. The swap was reversed. Indian cricket, by a margin of fifteen minutes, kept Gavaskar. The story is true; it is in the official records of the King Edward Memorial Hospital.

His Test debut, in March 1971 in Port-of-Spain against the West Indies, is the single most consequential debut series in Indian cricket history. He missed the first Test with an injured fingernail. From the second Test onwards he scored, in five innings: 65, 67, 116, 64 not out, 1, and 220. India, who had never won a Test series in the Caribbean and had won only one Test there in 23 years, won the series 1-0. Gavaskar averaged 154.80. He was 21 years old. The West Indian crowds began calling him 'the little master,' a nickname that would, twenty years later, be inherited by Tendulkar but that originated, indisputably, with Gavaskar.

The most-cited innings of his career is the 221 he made in the second innings of the 1979 Oval Test against England, chasing 438. India needed 438 to win, the highest fourth-innings chase in Test history. They reached 429 for 8. Gavaskar made 221 across two days, batting eight hours, calling each shot in advance, never lofting the ball, never offering a single chance. India fell nine short. The Wisden Cricketers' Almanack later called the innings 'the most majestic act of orderly defiance in the modern game.' He himself, asked decades afterwards if he had ever doubted India would win, said only: 'We came so close that the loss feels, in some odd way, like a kind of permission. Indians can chase.'

He was the first cricketer to score 10,000 Test runs. He was, until Tendulkar, the holder of the record for most Test centuries — 34. He averaged 51.12 in Tests and 65.45 in Tests against the West Indies, the side everyone else averaged 25 against. He played without a helmet for almost his entire career. He retired in 1987 with 34 centuries; only Bradman, in cricket history, had a higher Test average among openers. He is the only Indian batsman in history to score a century against every Test-playing nation of his era. The list of records he held when he retired ran to seven pages.

After cricket he became a writer of unusual literary quality. His memoir Sunny Days is widely considered the best book ever written by an Indian cricketer. He has spent 35 years as a television commentator, where his erudition has been the single steadying voice in Indian cricket commentary — refusing nationalism, refusing hyperbole, calling each delivery on its technical merit. He has been the president of the BCCI in an emergency capacity; he has refused, multiple times, to stand for the position permanently. His son Rohan played a single Test for India in 1991. His grandson is named Arjun.

He is, in May 2026, 76 years old and still in the commentary box. He is the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar credits as having taught him how to leave the ball. He is the cricketer Brian Lara has named as the only opener he would pick to face the 1970s West Indian attack ahead of himself. He is, by every Indian cricketer of his generation's admission, the man who proved that India did not have to apologise for playing the game. Indians had been apologising, in some form, since 1932. Gavaskar walked into Port-of-Spain in 1971, scored a triple-double, and made the apologies obsolete.