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".

Sachin at his best

Centurion, 1 March 2003

Sachin Tendulkar has never batted better than in the World Cup of 2003, and during it never better than for three famous deliveries against Shoaib Akhtar in Centurion.

This was a match Tendulkar said he was compelled to live a year in advance. Everywhere he went, people reminded him about the 1st of March, the fixture against Pakistan. Consequently he did not sleep properly for 12 nights leading up.

Facing a handsome target, Tendulkar shed his pent-up anxiety with three strokes in Shoaib's opening over to jumpstart a classic innings. The first of them - reaching out (were he not so pumped up, he would have surely let it pass for a wide), at once cutting and tipping, very high over the square third-man boundary - would become an icon, for cricketing merit; its sheer thrill, and nationalist symbolism, a sort of belated rebuff to the Miandad six.

The second stroke was his lovely trademark - back in the crease and with swirling wrists diverting a reasonable delivery to square leg. But the third shot - the third shot.

A little trot across to off stump, block, down the ground to the on, four. No back-lift, no follow-through: none needed. I have never seen such a concisely expressed cricket stroke. He simply met the ball and the entire execution began there and finished there. And by now the crowd, the most vividly alive of the tournament, had gone quite wild. Visually it was like a cinematic special effect: everything moved in a blur - flags, roars, horns, waves, the ball, Shoaib - and amid it Sachin and his pure stroke appeared magically frozen.

Tendulkar serves notice

Peshawar, 16 December 1989

The crowd was huge, and some of them even had tickets. Many took advantage of the general spirit of friendliness and sat anywhere they could. It is easy to see why the forefathers of the security men at Peshawar could not control the Khyber Pass. Amid the confusion, a legend was born there 20 years ago.

He was 16, had almost curly hair, curiosity in his eyes, and steel in his wrists. His treatment of Abdul Qadir is part of folklore now. Sachin Tendulkar played only because it was not an official one-day match, and Kapil Dev was nursing a stiff neck. At that stage there was no plan to play Tendulkar in the one-day tournament at all. But after that he couldn't be denied.

Eighteen deliveries changed everything. In that time he made 53 (unbeaten), hitting Mushtaq Ahmed for two huge sixes, and then Abdul Qadir for 27 runs in a single over, with three sixes in a row. There was no wild slogging. When Qadir dropped one short as Tendulkar stepped out, the batsman had the arrogance to go through with his shot anyway. The bat made a lovely arc, and for all we know the ball is still travelling - no one could find it.

At the other end was the captain, Kris Srikkanth, no slouch himself. Later that evening he said, referring to the one-day series, "The little bugger must play now." The little bugger has been playing ever since.

Tendulkar goes after Warne

Sharjah, 22 April 1998

Cricket is perhaps the most individual of all team sports. What would it be, shorn of the drama of one-against-one contests?

In this particular case, both actors had etched themselves into cricketing folklore. Both were legends who had little but their egos at stake. And when skill, will, determination and effort all pad up to defend ego, it makes for fascinating viewing.

Shane Warne, injured shoulder ignored, round the wicket to Sachin Tendulkar on a Sharjah track offering some assistance was one such intriguing contest. Before the ball could come down and do its trick, Tendulkar had got to the pitch of it. And once the ball had been reached and the spin smothered, up came the heavy bat with lightning-quick speed to send it straight into the billboards at long-on. Warne had been conquered, Warne had been decimated. And he had been left with a vision that continued to haunt him.

Warne, wiping the sweat off his face in frustration, desperation, or bewilderment and appreciation, perhaps. The great Shane Warne, for once in his life, had thrown in the towel. Tendulkar had well and truly won the contest of the titans. And soon, India the Coca-Cola Cup.

Chennai applauds Pakistan

Chennai, 31 January 1999

Every once in a while, there are moments in sport that transcend the action on the field and yet help establish the very essence of sport by carrying it beyond the confines of nationalism, and indeed victory and defeat. By all standards the first Test of the 1998-99 series between India and Pakistan was going to be remembered as a classic even without the final touch.

It see-sawed for four days: bowled out for 238 on the first day, Pakistan struck back, restricting India to 254. Then Shahid Afridi threatened to take the match beyond India's pale with a violent 141 before Venkatesh Prasad engineered the most sensational of collapses, which sunk Pakistan from 275 for 4 to 286 all out. But at 82 for 5 before lunch on the fourth day, it all seemed over for India - barring Sachin Tendulkar, of course. With stubborn support from Nayan Mongia, Tendulkar chipped away at the target, initially nudging and pushing, and then with a flurry of dazzling strokes.

Mongia lost his head, and his wicket, when India were 53 short, but it was the dismissal of a visibly tired Tendulkar, struggling with a back injury, that swung the match for Pakistan. They claimed the last four wickets for four runs and won by 12 runs.

The series had begun under a cloud of uncertainty, with Indian fundamentalists threatening to disrupt Pakistan's first tour to India in 12 years. Diplomatic relations between the two countries had been prickly at best, and all it needed was a small incident for the tour to be called off. But just as the security forces were getting in to position to tackle any unpleasantness that may have arisen, the crowd in Chennai, stunned at first by the turn of events, rose to their feet and began to clap.

It wasn't delirious or frenzied, but measured and sustained. The Pakistan team immediately took their cue and ran a victory lap around the ground. For anyone with any experience of India-Pakistan cricket, this was a deeply moving, even seminal, moment. Five years later the echoes were still being heard - in the National Stadium in Karachi.