It is still quite an astonishing fact that Irfan Pathan didn’t prosper as an international cricketer for as long as fans had thought after he’d made his debut in 2003 as a 19-year-old.
With his talent, skillset and dearth of seam-bowling all-rounders in India, Pathan was soon elevated to being hailed as the next successor of Kapil Dev. Pathan had a glorious start to his career with a Test match win in Adelaide, a Test hat-trick in Pakistan and followed it up with a T20 World Cup 2007 triumph.
His successes with India brought him lucrative IPL deals for years.
However, it all came crashing down and Pathan played his last match for India in 2012, aged only 28. He was part of the squad that won the 2013 Champions Trophy, but didn’t get to play a single match in the tournament and was dropped from the team after that.
In January 2020, Irfan announced his official retirement, which would allow him to play in the leagues such as the Road Safety T20 series and the ongoing Legend League Cricket.
Fan blames MS Dhoni, Irfan Pathan gives a heart-winning reply
Often at times, Pathan’s exclusion from the Indian team in 2012 is blamed on MS Dhoni by fans. Not just Pathan, but the fans of Gambhir, Sehwag, Yuvraj and Harbhajan have criticised Dhoni for the ouster of these legends from the Indian team.
Recently, Irfan Pathan, who is currently leading the Bhilwara Kings in the Legends League Cricket, told a fan to not blame former captain MS Dhoni for how his shortened India career. The fan had taken to Twitter to laud Pathan’s recent form in the LLC while he also criticised the former India skipper.
“Every time i see Irfan Pathan in these leagues, i curse MS & his management even more…I can’t believe, he played last white ball game at the age of just 29…Perfect no. 7, any team would die for..But India played Jaddu, even Binny #LegendsLeagueCricket,” the tweet read
The Baroda cricketer took notice of this tweet and the hate toward MS Dhoni, and he came up with a gem of a reply.
“Don’t blame any one. Thank you for love,” Pathan replied.
Here, check out Irfan Pathan’s terrific reply:
Don’t blame any one. Thank you for love ❤️
— Irfan Pathan (@IrfanPathan) September 27, 2022
Irfan finished with 29 Tests, 120 ODIs and 24 T20Is wherein he snapped up 100, 173 and 28 wickets respectively, and scored over 2500 runs for India.
