Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s social media handles shared a live video of the conversation with the Indian team on Friday, July 5, a day after the celebration for the T20 World Cup champions. The T20 World Cup-winning Indian team got a hero’s welcome both at the airport and the hotel in Delhi on July 4 before meeting PM Modi and then in Mumbai at Marine Drive and at the Wankhede Stadium with the streets being jam-packed in southern part of the city and the stadium being full as well.
PM Modi congratulated the Indian team for winning the T20 World Cup and said that not just in sports, the squad will inspire the whole nation with its team spirit, hard work and efforts on and off the field together as a group as not just win, they can give much more to the whole country.
The first of many questions, PM Modi had from the Indian team was to skipper Rohit Sharma while asking him about his Barbados pitch’s soil-eating act, something Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic has done umpteen times in Grand Slams. Asked about his thinking behind the same by PM Modi, Rohit responded by saying that he wanted to keep something as a souvenir of the place, the venue where the Indian team achieved their World Cup win.
“The place, the playing surface where we got our victory, I just wanted to keep something from that. I wanted to keep a moment of that to remember for my life and hence I tasted that. Because we won after playing on that pitch and everyone waited for that moment for so long, everyone put in so much effort for that. Numerous times in the past we came very close to achieving that but fell short and finally, we achieved through the team’s effort,” Rohit tells PM Modi.
Rohit said that the World Cup win came on that very wicket and it will remain very special for him. PM Modi also went on to ask Rohit about his walk to collect the trophy which the skipper responded back saying that the team was excited and emotional after winning the tournament and mentioned that Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal suggested him to do something different and not walk plainly while going to receive the trophy.
Rohit recreated Lionel Messi and Ric Flair’s trophy-receiving walk, something that Shreyas Iyer, the Kolkata Knight Riders skipper did last month on his way to receive the IPL 2024 trophy.
