Hyderabad: Former India opening batsman turned cricket commentator Aakash Chopra has denied nepotism's existence in the at the highest level of Indian cricket but also admitted that there have been cases at the domestic level.
"I have seen it happening in a state team where a player was a captain for a long time. He was an administrator's son, not a player's. He was not a very good player and his stats also show it. But at the highest level, it never happens. No one is given an IPL contract because he is someone's friend's son or someone's nephew," Aakash said.
He took the examples of Rohan Gavaskar and Arjun Tendulkar, who are sons of batting greats Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar respectively.
"Now just because he was Sunil Gavaskar's son he should have played a lot of cricket, many ODIs and Test matches. But that did not happen.
"And when he played for India, it was because he was consistently doing very well for Bengal. In fact, forget all that, he was even not playing in the Mumbai Ranji team. He was not getting a place in the Mumbai team even though he had the surname as Gavaskar," Chopra said.
Gavaskar played 11 ODI matches for India in which he scored 151 runs. However, he played 117 first-class games and scored 6938 runs at an average of 44.19.
"You can say the same thing about Arjun Tendulkar. Because he is Tendulkar's son, nothing was given to him on a platter. He didn't get an easy access to the Indian cricket team. There were no such useless selections even in the India under-19 team. Whenever the selection happens, it would be because of a sterling performance," Chopra said.
