Legendary Indian all-rounder Yuvraj Singh has been pretty honest about the reasons behind his 2019 decision to hang up his cricket boots once and for all. Not long after being left out of India’s World Cup squad that summer, Yuvraj walked away from the IPL and the international scene too. It was a big deal, marking the end of a long & emotional journey through the game he’d loved since he was a kid. At the time, the 44 year old was 44 years old and said in the end it was simply that he’d stopped enjoying the game. He made it clear that others around him – or rather the way they were treating him – played a big part in his decision.
It wasn’t like one disastrous series or a particularly tough time had Yuvraj feeling like this. Instead, the sport was starting to feel like a burden that was weighing him down more than it was giving back – a combination of mental, physical and emotional fatigue that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
” I just wasn’t enjoying my game anymore. I had this nagging feeling of why am I bothering with it. I wasn’t feeling like people were backing me, or respecting me. And I was asking myself – why on earth do I need to keep at this if I’m not getting it? Why do I need to keep going if I’m not feeling it? I didn’t need to do it to prove a point – what was the point I was trying to prove anyway? I was telling myself I was going to do more with my game than I could actually manage , & it was getting to me. And once I stopped playing… well, I was myself again” – he said during a podcast chat with Sania Mirza a while back.
It’s a bit of a bombshell from someone who’s seen the best of the sporting world. In all of the glamour & glitz of professional sports, it’s easy to forget that the people who shine so brightly under the spotlight tend to be fighting demons we can hardly imagine. As far as Yuvraj’s concerned, the sheer repetition of the question “why” isn’t just a rhetorical flourish – it’s a cycle that athletes find themselves trapped in, when their bodies give out, their performances start to suffer and the world around them starts to look a whole lot less secure.
The simplest sentence of all is probably this one – “stopping didn’t break me – it put me back together” – and that’s the thing that really hits home.
During the same podcast, Yuvraj also talked about a time in his teenage years when people were questioning his ability to play the sport. However, instead of taking it personally and getting all bitter , he chose to give the benefit of the doubt – in this case, timing and perception rather than a direct attack on him. He said “If I look back on it now, I just think he was too busy to really pay attention to me & just being polite to my dad. And of course, at that time he was playing for India so, yeah, he would have said that. I was a pretty raw 13-14 year old at the time, just starting out in this sport. I didn’t take it to heart but my father did though”
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