Tendulkar become Sachin again...!!

Nov-5 2009

Coming November, Sachin Tendulkar would have played 20 years of international cricket. During those twenty years, although things have changed radically in Indian cricket, someone who looked at the scorecard for today's match, would have been forgiven for thinking that Indian cricket was stuck in a time-warp and that nothing had changed from Tendulkar's early years to now. It was a familiar tale of Tendulkar being the one-man army taking on the opposition under daunting circumstances. But what an army he proved to be! He very nearly pulled off a miracle for India, but destiny had only one landmark in store for him today. The man himself would have much preferred an Indian victory to 17,000 runs, but it was not to be


It is not every day that you can make 175 in an international game of cricket and feel so thoroughly miserable,but its Sachin !!!Nobody does solos better than him, nor, perhaps, has anyone endured as much heartbreak during those solos. Tendulkar almost broke the record for the highest score in one-day internationals (19 short of Saeed Anwar's mark - and 11 short of his own personal best); he almost led India to what would have been the second highest winning score batting second in an ODI (they finished four runs shy of beating Australia's 350-4 and had needed only 19 off 18 balls when Tendulkar was out); he almost kept India's hopes of becoming the world No 1 alive (now that Australia have a 3-2 lead in the seven-match series they cannot be overtaken). It was India of the 90s all over again: Again the same Sachin careless and free , Fighting alone .. same india choking again !!!! Tendulkar almost chased 351 on his own but, with the target in sight, he got out and the rest choked, falling short by three runs with two balls still to go. Remember In Chennai January 1998-99, Tendulkar, having played an innings as incredible as this, left the last three wickets 18 to get; tonight he left them 19 off 17 and we did it again !!!

And to cap all that, it was reported today that some 12-year-old kid has beaten one of Tendulkar's earliest feats. One Sarfaraz Khan made 439 off 421 balls in a three-day match for Springfield Rizvi school in Mumbai against the Indian Education Society. When he reached 330, he passed Tendulkar's best as a schoolboy, which he set in 1988 as a 15-year-old.
Sarfaraz then went on to pass the 349 that Vinod Kambli had made in the same game as Tendulkar - they shared a stand of 664 - and by the time he was out Sarfaraz had the highest score ever made in the inter-school Harris Shield tournament.

Is this the new SACHIN in making ...!!!

The Master moment !! The man with billion expectations..

I have read somewhere that :
“For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard about them.”
After Sachin Tendulkar’s first Test match in Karachi 20 years ago produced just 15 runs and five wicketless overs for 25, hardened cynics might have questioned the wisdom of thrusting a 16-year-old on to such a stage.


A week later, in Faisalabad, there was nowhere to hide. When Tendulkar arrived at the crease to join his Mumbai teammate, Sanjay Manjrekar, India were in disarray at 101 for 4. In a column many years later, Wasim Akram wrote: “It was a lush green wicket, possibly the greenest I’ve seen in Pakistan, and Tendulkar was batting on 20-odd when a ball from me hit him. I immediately asked him if he was alright and he looked me in the eye and nodded. I was a 21-year-old then, so I did not give the matter much thought, but in retrospect that score of 50-odd was the first hint the world got about Tendulkar’s special talent.”

For the world, it was a hint. For the boy himself, it was so much more. “My first innings was a disaster,” he said. “When I walked out at Faisalabad, I told myself that I would do my best to just stay at the wicket, even if I didn’t score runs.” He finished with 59, having stayed at the crease for a shade over 4 hours. And although it didn’t win the Test, or set the pulse racing, it meant a lot to someone thrown in at the deep end. “I said to myself, ‘You can handle this, it’s not a place where you don’t belong.’”

In one of its special issues, Time magazine had Tendulkar’s debut at No. 4 in its list of Top 10 Sporting Moments, behind Michael Jordan’s The Shot (against the Cleveland Cavaliers), Pete “Charlie Hustle” Rose being banned from baseball and Arsenal winning the English league title in the last minute of the 1988-89 season. In the years to come, you can take it for granted that thousands will claim that they were at the National Stadium on 15 November when he walked out in an India cap for the first time. In retrospect, it was certainly an I-was-there moment, though few could have imagined that Tendulkar would still be punching the ball through the covers two decades later.

Perhaps we in India can’t really fathom the full extent of the adoration and expectation that he has had to deal with in that time. Matthew Hayden, another batting colossus of our age, gave voice to what many outsiders feel when he wrote: “His life seems to be a stillness in a frantic world and I admire his mental strength. When Tendulkar goes out to bat, it’s beyond chaos—it is a frantic appeal by a nation to one man.”

Some, like Muhammad Ali, protected themselves with a veneer of loudmouthed arrogance. Others, like George Best, lost themselves in a haze of boozy, womanizing nights. With Tendulkar, the humility, the feeling that he considered himself truly fortunate to be doing what he did, never went away, even if it cost him any semblance of a normal life. “I could say that I didn’t get to do all those things that a normal teenager would do,” he told once, “but then again, not many people get the opportunity to do what I do.”

That awareness of the big picture was best illustrated in Steve Waugh’s final Test at SCG (Sydney Cricket Ground) in January 2004. Twenty minutes before stumps, with Australia seemingly safe, Waugh—who had scripted a typically defiant 80 just when his team most needed it—swept a delivery from Anil Kumble to deep square leg, where Tendulkar wrapped his hands around it. As 40,000 Australians rose in unison, it took Tendulkar a moment to comprehend the significance of the occasion.

“Honestly, I wasn’t thinking that I had a hand in Steve Waugh’s last dismissal,” he said later. “I was thinking of how we could pull off the win. But once I realized that it was his last innings, I ran all the way from the boundary to congratulate him. I said, ‘You’ve made every Australian proud, and every cricketer admires you’. That was about it really, nothing more.”

Just as Sunil Gavaskar was defined by his heroics against the all-conquering West Indies, so Tendulkar remains peerless because of the enormity of his achievements against Australia. Numbers matter in sport, but nothing counts quite as much as how you do against the best. With 10 Test centuries and eight one-day hundreds against the dominant team of his era, Tendulkar’s place in the pantheon is beyond dispute.

More than cold statistics though, it’s the moments that will endure long after he’s put his bat away for the last time. That final over in the Hero Cup semi-final. The audacious assault on Shane Warne in Chennai. The cold-eyed targeting of Shoaib Akhtar at Centurion, South Africa, in 2003. That 175 in Haydrabad !!! , That match-winning century in Chennai, just a fortnight after the streets in the vicinity of his restaurant in Mumbai had resembled war-torn Beirut.

And most of all, Perth in February 1992. That magical 114 on a lightning-fast pitch, even as the team was routed by 300 runs. Watching the teenager stand on tiptoe and cut and drive with the panache of an old pro in baggy green, Merv Hughes, he of the walrus moustache and the colourful sledges, turned to Allan Border and said, “This little ***** is going to get more runs than you, AB.” And He was right.

Vettori of the Year !!!

In a shocking mix-up that's sure to have major implications on cricket, the ICC has totally misunderstood Ricky Ponting's views on dead-rubber ODIs and have introduced the world's first dead-rubber international world cup.
According to the new tournament rules, eight of the world's top cricketing nations will play each other in a league stage consisting entirely of meaningless dead-rubber matches. The four best teams will then play the two semi-finals and the final, which will also be dead rubbers. The tournament winner will then be decided by a draw of lots.
"This is the first in a long list of initiatives from the ICC to revitalise cricket, based on feedback from the game's many stakeholders, including players, boards, the media and fans," said an ICC spokesman, pulling a rabbit out of his hat for effect. Explaining some of the future plans the ICC has in store for the game, he said, "We all know that fans come to see fours and sixes, so in the future we'll be introducing a new format that will eliminate those pesky singles, twos and dot balls, and will consist solely of boundary hits."
He also hinted at the possibility of a future event that will consist purely of media coverage, with no actual cricket being played. "We'll see how those pampered punk players complain about too much cricket then, shall we?" he thought to himself, making a timely exit before anyone asked inconveniently pertinent questions.
The new tournament has generated mixed responses around the world.
"This idea is worse than the 51 which Sepp Blatter has every day," said an anguished Ponting, who is distraught at being wrongly credited for the innovation. "It's ridiculous. You say one thing and people hear something completely different. Now I know how Harbhajan Singh feels," he said, in an unexpected show of sympathy for Australia's best loved offspinner.
"Oh! Awesome! This is great news for South Africa!" said a delighted Graeme Smith. "We usually lose crucial matches, but since the dead-rubber World Cup will have no crucial matches whatsoever, we're sure to win this time," he pointed out, rather logically.
In another exciting development, India, which recently fired Venkatesh Prasad and Robin Singh as bowling and fielding coach respectively, has given Singh back his job, albeit in a different role. Singh and former India team-mate Ajay Jadeja will be the new "futile 50-partnership in a losing cause" coaches for the Indian team.
"When your team is down four wickets for 25, chasing a 300-plus total, you need batsmen who can buckle down and put on a dull, pointless 50-run partnership, raise false hope, and then trigger a collapse by needlessly getting run out or holing out to long-on. Robin and I were past masters at this crucial skill, and we're extremely excited to have an opportunity to pass on our knowledge to youngsters," said Jadeja, with Singh nodding his approval.
"It's a skill that has pretty much disappeared from the Indian side, though Praveen Kumar and Harbhajan Singh showed some glimpses of promise in that game against Australia. Still, it was far too exciting to be a true classic in the Jadeja-Robin Singh tradition," said BCCI President Shashank Manohar. "By hiring the former greats as coaches, we hope to bring this aspect of the team back to where it once was," he added, causing a sharp rise in the blood-pressure levels of Indian cricket fans worldwide.
And finally, to save enormous amounts of time and money, New Zealand Cricket has decided to consolidate all their national cricketing awards for bowling, batting, fielding and coaching into a single award called the "Daniel Vettori of the Year".