Master in 'WHITES'

“I’ve seen GOD, he bats for India at no. 4 in Tests”, were Mathew Hayden’s exact words when he saw Tendulkar play. Hello and Welcome once again to one more episode of the “Champion’s Folklore”. But how do you do Tendulkar in a single blog? So here’s the fun gig, I thought I’ll concentrate on Tendulkar “The Red Ball Player” in this one and move on to Tendulkar “The White Ball Master” in the next. 

 You look at his career and it would boggle your mind that he started playing international cricket at 16 and even more so when you heard him regret the fact that he was not in that fearsome tour of the West Indies when he wasn’t even 16. And then in 1989 he made his debut, who did he make his debut against? There was Wasim and Waqar and Imran three lethal fast bowlers who were terrorising batsmen across the globe. In that 89 series he made a couple of decent scores , it was then that you saw glimpses of what a player he would go on to be. It took him a couple of series before he got his first Test hundred, it was a romantic hundred in England, one that saved India a Test match. Then the hundreds started coming, when look at that scorecard of the Sydney Test match, you still wonder how terribly young he was when he got that hundred, and then came that magical innings at Perth. It was a privilege to able to watch a recorded version of that innings and I was taken aback by the fact that how quickly he was scoring runs. It goes without saying that it was one of the highest points of his career. Then you see the 240 odd he got at Perth in that 2003 series, he wasn’t in the best of forms and that was an innings where he restrained himself from playing that delightful cover drive of his. These two innings at Perth brilliantly describe the two facets of Tendulkar’s play. For a major part of his career Tendulkar was India’s 10 for 2 man. There were a lot of new opening combinations that were being tried and what that meant was more often than not Tendulkar would be out there in the middle batting at number 4 within a few overs after the match started. It was then you saw him holding India’s innings at one end and rather protecting it. When you talk about Tendulkar you can’t skip the Chennai connection, can you? He got a hundred that is not much talked about and the reason being he made batting look easy in his innings of 165 against England in 1993, it didn’t make to the shortlist of his special ones. Then there was the triumvirate of great innings the 155 he got against Australia in 1998 where he said “Someone needs to score a quick fire 80 to get the match in India’s favour” and there was he himself fulfilling the task, of course there was that 136 in 1999 which ended in tragedy and finally the 126 in 2001 which helped India clinch a series victory against the mighty Aussies. If you’re looking for emotion in sport you can’t go past the 103 in 2008 against England, when the British did India a great favour by coming to play after the Mumbai attacks. It meant so much for Tendulkar and everybody else, finally cricket was back after the horrors of the attack. That was an innings that transcended Cricket. There was one final fling to his greatness in that period of 2007-08 when he was having all kinds of trouble with his body, but once he came back, in the next period of 2009,10,11 Tendulkar was batting like the way people knew him to bat, like the young Tendulkar who would always bring a smile to your lips whenever he walked on to the 22 yards. 

 He finally finished with 51 hundreds in Test cricket. When Gavaskar got 34 you said wow, a few cricketers have gone past Gavaskar since but will there be someone who’ll go past Tendulkar? Well if they do they’ll have to be a mighty fine player. In getting to those 51 hundreds and every other landmark Tendulkar showed what was possible on that 22 yards. The fact that he ascended to become the best batsman in Test cricket inspired a lot of young cricketers from India and in many ways is a testimony to the fact that everything is possible if you put your mind to it. Finally when he retired in 2013 it was probably the most emotional moment for Cricket as a whole. The speech that he gave at the Wankhede man that was something special. I do request you go out there and see if you can listen to it and not have a tear in your eye. Throughout a career that spanned for 24 years there was never a moment when Tendulkar brought the game to disrepute, there were fingers which were pointed here and there but those were all trivial. In many ways he stood for all the cultures and everything that cricket stands for. It was a pleasure to write about someone of the caliber of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.