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If you are good at studies, and you want to play cricket, you may work harder than any other person, but you may not achieve it. So it's something you have to balance in life and be practical where you are good and then channelise your efforts in the right direction to be successful in life.

For its health, cricket needs to look outward to the sharpest minds, to people who sustain and nurture brands and often take hard but necessary decisions. Cricket cannot be bound by cricketing minds alone.

You need to protect the best players in the country. When there is so much cricket, we must work on ways to prolong their careers.

Cricket, like all sport, offers glory to few and a lifetime of it to even fewer. For the investment it demands, it offers short careers that end when people in other professions are starting to flourish.

I have played cricket on my own terms.

It was a personal decision for me to stand and say that cricket is all I have in life, there's nothing I need to do other than cricket. If I want to achieve whatever I thought as a kid, I need to work hard and not let it go to waste.

People need to take as much interest in other sports as they take in cricket, and that's where we come across a vicious cycle of performance, sponsorship, recognition, jobs and TV visibility. It's a typical chicken-and-egg story; each one is directly related to the other without an answer for what comes first.

If someone thinks, 'I'll spend the off season working on my fitness and I'll come back a better cricketer,' I don't think that's enough. You need to spend a lot of time working on your skills and honing your skills.

Cricket is very simple... you play till you can sustain.

Being a professional cricketer, you have to adapt to the conditions quickly. It takes time to get rhythm when you are constantly traveling from one country to another.