From U-19 Indian Team To Playing For USA In T20WC, Saurabh Netravalkar’s Journey Is Awesome
The ongoing T20 World Cup 2024 is being co-hosted by USA and West Indies and despite being the debutant in the T20 World Cup, USA has certainly impressed everyone with their superb game.
The USA team has won 2 out of 3 league matches which also include the win against the 2009 T20 World Cup winners, i.e., Pakistan. Though USA lost the match against India, it’s creditable on the team’s part that they didn’t give away the match easily and India had to make good efforts to win the match.
Many players in the USA team are of the Indian origin and their parents who are living in India faced the dilemma of which team to support during India-USA clash.
Naresh Netravalkar and Rama Netravalkar, the parents of the USA cricketer of the Indian origin, Saurabh Netravalkar also faced the same dilemma as they never wanted to see India lose the match but they also wished their son to perform well.
Saurabh Netravalkar has been performing pretty well as he defended 18 runs in the super over in the match against Pakistan and helped his team win the game. The result of India-USA match came as per the expectations but Saurabh’s parents were happier as not only India won the match but Saurabh also performed well. In fact, he won the hearts of Indian cricket fans because of the manner in which he dismissed Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.
Currently Naresh Netravalkar and Saurabh’s sister Nidhi are pretty busy in talking to mediapersons, replying to congratulatory messages and meeting guests because now they have become famous as Saurabh’s family in Mumbai and India as well.
Initially, Saurabh’s parents were not much interested in making him play cricket. His mother saw an advertisement which featured the legendary former Indian cricketer Sunil Gavaskar and decided to send him to play cricket so that he understands the high level at which the game is played and he chooses to back-off on his own. However, the opposite happened and Nidhi stated in an interview that it became a daily routine for their parents to take Saurabh from Malad to Churchgate for coaching and the parents did it quite passionately.
Nidhi further said that for six to seven years, Saurabh went to Churchgate after school, he used to travel for one hour by train and he used to finish his homework while travelling on the train. Nidhi said that from the very beginning, Saurabh managed his studies and cricket in a proper manner and this is how his journey started.
In 2010, Saurabh Netravalkar was a part of India’s Under-19 World Cup squad and he played along with KL Rahul, Jaydev Unadkat, Harshal Patel, Mayank Agarwal and Sandeep Sharma. However, Saurabh was equally passionate about computer science because of which he took admission in engineering in Sardar Patel Institute of Technology (SPIT), Mumbai.
Before turning towards coding completely, Saurabh gave 2 years to cricket and in these two years, he debuted in the Ranji Trophy and also played for Mumbai for some time. Though he tried his best for 2 years, still he was not sure about the future so he applied in few colleges for Masters and got admission in Ivy League college, Cornell (University).
Nidhi also said that Saurabh didn’t even take his cricket kit to USA in 2015 as for him, it was the end of his cricket career but he didn’t have any bitter feelings as he had given his 100 percent to cricket.
Nidhi added that thugh Saurabh chose a different path but what is meant to happen, it happens for sure. He may have left his cricket kit at his home in Mumbai but he once against started playing cricket but on weekends only for having some fun. One of the coaches from Mumbai told Saurabh about a club and asked him to go and practice over there as a hobby and Saurabh started doing that.
Nidhi said that soon people over there realized that he is an Under-19 player as his potential was visible to everyone. She further said that soon he moved from club cricket to university cricket and kept moving until he made it to the USA team. Nidhi said that there were no plans of Saurabh playing cricket for USA before he moved to USA and the only word that describes his journey is destiny.
Saurabh is currently working for Oracle corp and the management is quite supportive as they have allowed him to play and work from anywhere.
As of now, USA has secured a place in the Super Eight and it is certainly a big achievement for a team which is playing in the T20 World Cup for the first time.
Saurabh’s story is certainly an inspirational one, what do you say?
The post From U-19 Indian Team To Playing For USA In T20WC, Saurabh Netravalkar’s Journey Is Awesome appeared first on RVCJ Media.
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