Top three Indian cricketers who were not awarded Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna
The Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna is the highest Indian sporting honour. It is awarded every year by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. The award winners are are honoured for their "spectacular and most outstanding performance in the field of sports over a period of four years" at the international level.
The award was initiated in 1992 and Vishwanathan Anand was the first recipient for his accomplishments in the game of chess. The latest winners of the Khel Ratna were Bajrang Punia (wrestling) and Deepa Malik (para athletics) in 2019. Till date, 38 sportspersons have been bestowed with this award. The most Khel Ratnas have been awarded in the sport of shooting with eight shooters being among the worthy recipients.
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Only three cricketers, namely Sachin Tendulkar (1998), Mahendra Singh Dhoni (2007) and Virat Kohli (2018), have had the privilege to get this award. Not considering Sunil Gavaskar (who had already retired in 1987) and Kapil Dev (who was at the closing stages of his career when the awards started), following are the three Indian cricketers who might consider themselves distinctly unlucky not to have received this award.
#3 Sourav Ganguly
Sourav Ganguly had an illustrious career for India, both as captain and player. When Dada took over the captaincy, Indian cricket was in a turmoil under the cloud of match fixing allegations with big players like Mohammad Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja, Manoj Prabhakar and one Test-old Ajay Sharma being banned and the great Kapil Dev's name also being dragged into the scandal.
In such a scenario, when even Tendulkar was unwilling to take over the reins of Indian cricket, Ganguly stepped forward and with his sheer leadership skills brought the team back on the winning track. This helped restore the faith of the passionate fans in the Indian cricket team.
Ganguly proved to be one of India's most successful captains. Some of India's greatest test wins came under his leadership. These include the 2001 Kolkata Test win against Australia which is regarded as one of the greatest comebacks of all time; the 2002 Leeds Test win when India chose to bat first on a green pitch after winning the toss; the 2003 Adelaide Test victory where India came back to win the test after conceding more than 550 runs in the first innings.
For the statistics, India won 21 of the 49 tests under Ganguly's captaincy with 11 of those wins coming on overseas soil. He also lead India to the 2003 World Cup final.
Ganguly's record as a player was also impressive with 7,212 test runs at an average of 42.17 and 11,363 runs in ODI cricket at an average of 41.02. He was also a very handy seam bowler with 32 wickets in Tests and 100 wickets in ODIs.
Although he was recommended for the Khel Ratna by the BCCI in 2004, he lost out to the worthy winner Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore who had just returned after bagging a silver medal in the Athens Olympics.