Paddy Upton recently launched his book ‘The Barefoot Coach’. (Express photo by Ravi Kanojia) Paddy Upton recently launched his book ‘The Barefoot Coach’. (Express photo by Ravi Kanojia)

Former India mental conditioning coach Paddy Upton has claimed in his book, ‘The Barefoot Coach’, that one of the biggest professional errors in his role with the Indian cricket team was ‘a joke’ asking the players to have sex.

The current Rajasthan Royals coach said that the media blew his sexual dossier out of proportion, calling it ‘just the jokes and tongue-in-cheeks mistakes’. IANS quoted Upton as saying, “I wasn’t telling the players to do anything. I was sharing information. And what was taken out of context in the media was the jokes that I told them; I wasn’t suggesting players do that.”

“That was just the jokes and tongue-in-cheeks mistakes that I made. It certainly wasn’t instructions or suggestions to players. But, yes, I made the mistake, as I mentioned in the book, easily my biggest professional error,” Upton added.

In his book, Upton has also described cricketer-turned-politician Gautam Gambhir as “mentally insecure”. Reacting to Upton’s comments in his book, Gambhir said, “I don’t see anything sinister with what Paddy wrote. He is a top guy and I see this as his personal opinion. He just missed two important things: firstly, he didn’t state all the other facts and secondly, he failed to explain the perspective.”

Upton also recalled how the left-handed opener would be in ‘agony’ even after scoring a hundred and stressing more on the mistakes he made. “Anyone would like to have a guy who is not satisfied with his current achievements. So in short, I wasn’t satisfied with a 100 and wanted to have more,” Gambhir said.

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