5 cricketers who went down the political path
The holistic nature of cricket as a sport and the inclusion of umpteen elements in the course of each game of it, let alone a cricketer's lifetime, has always inculcated in the involved players' admirable qualities of delegation and responsibility. This particular reason has led to a lot of cricketers taking up administrative roles in their professional lives after they have had enough of the on-field action.
Lots of Australian upper tier leaders have been known to be cricket tragics, the sight of Bob Hawkes sculling his glass of beer is one of the most popular and applause triggering sights across stadia in all of Australia, bet it a parched afternoon in the wild wild west of Perth, or the social event of the year in South Australia, that is the soothing day-night Test match at Adelaide.
Here we look at some cricketers who turned into political leaders while batting in the second dig of their careers.
#5 Navjot Singh Sidhu
One of the most popular figures across the widened spectra of Indian television, Sidhu has always stood out, be it his Jekyll-Hyde brand of batting, blocking for hours and then launching into a flurry of aerial marked shots, or be it his colorful character-smeared speeches.
After retiring from his cricketing travails, that were the most known for the takedown of the then hyped Shane Warne, Sidhu found an affiliation with the Bhartiya Janta Party in 2004. But a court case against him meant that he had to wait for another five years to get his maiden general elections victory, and after years of campaigning to change Amritsar for the better, he was elected the Member of Parliament.
However, since then, his career has often seemed rather fluctuating, from not getting a ticket from BJP in 2014 to being inducted to Rajya Sabha in 2016 to avoid him from joining the Aam Aadmi Party, a decision that was soon defied by Sidhu himself. So far, his political stroke making has been surprisingly close to the one he displayed on the cricket wicket.