IPL a special treat for Ludhiana as 2 city boys make it to teams

LUDHIANA: The T-20 Indian Premier League (IPL) will be special for Ludhiana as two city residents have been included in two IPL teams. Nehal Wadhera of BRS Nagar and Sanveer Singh of Nandpur village in Sahnewal have made it to Mumbai Indians and Sunrise Hyderabad respectively for Rs 20 lakh.
Nehal Wadhera has been in the limelight for the past some time after being named the highest ever scorer in the 26-year history of India’s JP Atray Memorial National ODI Tournament, in which he scored 171, surpassing Lalit Yadav’s 168 and Shikhar Dhawan’s 161.

This April this year, Nehal set the world record in professional cricket (in any format) by scoring 578 runs off 414 balls in 468 minutes while playing against Bathinda in the Punjab State U-23 tournament. With this, Nehal achieved the fastest 200, 300, 400 and 500 runs scored in any level of recognised cricket in India.
Parents of 22-year-old Nehal, Kamal Wadhera and Gurpreet Wadhera are entrepreneurs. His Father Kamal Wadhera said, “In the last IPL season, he was among the unsold players however recently, his achievements have drawn selectors’ attention. He was called twice to Mumbai to display his skills, after which he was selected.”
The father shared that Nehal was athletic from an early age and his mother enrolled him into a cricket camp during vacations to channelise his energy. Though he was the youngest among other children, he was selected as the best player on the concluding day of the camp. Realising that he had an aptitude for cricket, they enrolled him in the Ludhiana district cricket association.
“After 2008, Nehal never looked back. For all these years, he has been playing, be it U-14, U-16, U-19. In 2019, he was chosen as captain of the India ‘A’ u-19 team and led the team in one-day matches against South Africa in Thiruvananthapuram,” he added.
Right hand batsman and medium pace bowler, Sanveer Singh, 26, was born in Sahnewal’s Nandpur village soon shifted to Patiala after his father Sukhdev Singh, a railway employee, was transferred. His mother Sharanjit Kaur is a homemaker. After Sanveer’s selection, his paternal uncles Gurdeep Singh, Baljeet Singh and his grandmother in Sahnewal organised a celebration in the village on Saturday.
Sanveer’s father Sukhdev Singh, who has been a national-level Kabbadi player, said that as a child, Sanveer loved a cricket bat over any other toy.
His mother Sharanjit Kaur said, “Sanveer’s father used to train Kabaddi players in the railways and he would take cricket training on the same ground. To ensure that he got more time to play and practice, we got a pitch made in our house when he was 12. He would practice day and night on the pitch. This is a dream come true for us.” She added that his best performance was in the Sayed Mustaq Ali trophy, in which he scored 54 in 18 balls. He takes his inspiration from Virat Kohli.