Domestic giant Wasim Jaffer reveals why he left Mumbai to play for Vidarbha

At 40, he doesn’t stand a chance to return to the national team again. But that doesn’t stop Wasim ‘the timeless’ Jaffer from going after the runs in domestic cricket. The batsman had a memorable 2018-19 season in Ranji Trophy for not only his bat spoke loudly but he also ended up in the title-winning team – Vidarbha. It was actually Jaffer’s 10th Ranji Trophy win, a feat which very few have a realistic chance of matching.

Jaffer made his first-class debut in 1996-97 and played in 31 Tests and two ODIs between 2000 and 2008. He has scored nearly 2,000 international runs and has five hundreds with the highest score of 212. It’s more than a decade now that the domestic giant had last played an international game but his hunger to score is far from over.

Jaffer, who became the first batsman to register two 1,000-run tally in Ranji Trophy this year (last time he did it in 2008-09) recently spoke to indiatvnews.com over telephone and spoke on a number of issues, including the fact that he felt “unwanted” in the Mumbai team that he served for a long time.

When asked what had made him move from Mumbai to Vidarbha in 2015-16 after playing for the domestic giants for years and also winning titles with them, Jaffer said he sensed that he would meet his end sooner or later and didn’t want to wait for that to happen.

‘Didn’t want to stop a youngster’s way to make national team’

“I realised that I am at a stage in my career where I am not going to play for India again. On a personal level, I wanted to challenge myself too. Also, there were murmurs about dropping me from the one-day team, even though I was the highest run-getter for Mumbai in one-dayers during that season. So, I had a feeling that they might look beyond me, sooner or later. Thus, I thought that it would be better if I move out, as you know the Mumbai side is a ladder to getting selected in the Indian team. I didn’t want to come in the way of a youngster eyeing a national berth.”

Jaffer also said that he did not want to give the Mumbai team management a chance to drop him after having served it for nearly two decades. He said he wanted to play for a win-hungry team where he could make a difference and when he saw Vidarbha, a team with potential making an offer to him, he didn’t think twice to grab it.

“And it turned out to be a good decision,” Jaffer said to India TV. Vidarbha won their second successive Ranji Trophy this year and the veteran batsman was part of the squad on both occasions.

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