Gavaskar, Sunil

Sunil Gavaskar, in full Sunil Manohar Gavaskar, bynames Sunny and the Little Master, (born July 10, 1949, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian cricket player who is considered one of the sport’s greatest opening batsmen of all time. Gavaskar skillfully captained the Indian team in 47 Test (international) matches and dominated the game during a career that spanned 16 years and 125 total Test contests.

Gavaskar was instigated into playing cricket in Bombay under the guidance of his Test-playing uncle, Madhav Mantri. Gavaskar’s impressive performance in domestic cricket soon attracted national notice, and he was selected for the extremely tough tour of the West Indies in 1971. Not only on that tour—when he scored 774 runs—but also in subsequent tours, Gavaskar was the one batsman the fearsome West Indian bowlers could never suppress. His world record of 34 Test centuries (100 runs in a single innings) stood for 19 years until it was broken by his countryman Sachin Tendulkar in 2005. Just 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 metres) tall, Gavaskar was a master of short-pitched bowling; very few fast bowlers could claim to have completely dominated him.

Gavaskar went on to break many records, setting his own long-standing Indian Test record of 236 not out (subsequently broken by Tendulkar). He is also the only Indian to have scored two centuries in a Test match on three occasions. A superb driver and cutter of the ball, Gavaskar was the first player to score 10,000 runs in Test matches. He was also an excellent fielder, with 108 catches during his career; he was the first Indian apart from wicket keepers to reach the landmark of 100 catches.

After his retirement in 1987, Gavaskar put his immense cricketing acumen to great use as a popular columnist for some of the leading Indian newspapers and magazines and as a widely respected television commentator. He was inducted into the International Cricket Council’s Hall of Fame in 2009.