Nasser Hussain has ‘huge respect’ for Sourav Ganguly for his 2002 Lord’s shirt wave

Describing the anguish of losing the match from a winning position on the Sky Sports’ The One That Got Away, Hussain said that the loss was rankling inside him, even as he exchanged pleasantries with the triumphant Indian team while they walked down the Long Room.

“You’re in the immediate zone of ‘how did I lose that game?'” Hussain said. “Even an hour and a half ago, we had them at 146-5, and now we’re walking off the field losers…And you’re looking up at Sourav, and that doesn’t bother you. All that bothers you is that, and hour and a half ago, we had the ‘fab five’ out, and we were winning the Natwest Trophy final, and now we’ve lost again. How did this happen?

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“Because you’re a captain who cares, you care about it for the rest of your life. The rest is just periphery, it’s just small stuff, it’s noise.”

With two runs needed off the last four balls, India squeezed home off a nervous overthrow, eking out a two-wicket win in their mammoth chase of 326. At that moment, Ganguly stood up from his spot on the balcony, and furiously started waving his shirt. It was an apparent riposte at Andrew Flintoff’s exact gesture in Mumbai four months ago.

“To this day, I admire Ganguly for doing that. He says, that…it must be VVS [Laxman] and Harbhajan [Singh] were having a chat on the balcony as they got four-five to win, and one of them said – ‘You gotta do something’. And in the same way I had to think should I point to my back or not [after his century earlier in the game], he said he had to think ‘Should I do this at Lord’s on the balcony?’

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“And I have huge respect for him for doing that, because that’s what made him the captain he was.

“They’ve asked me in India ‘Was it disgraceful for Ganguly doing that at Lord’s?’. No mate, that is well done, you won a final, you have your moment, you deserve it. My thoughts were about me, how did we lose.”