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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  A World Cup without Sachin
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A World Cup without Sachin

For the first time in over two decades there will be no Tendulkar. He will be missed

The Indian team after winning the 2011 World Cup. Photo: Michael Steele/ Getty ImagesPremium
The Indian team after winning the 2011 World Cup. Photo: Michael Steele/ Getty Images

In Netherland—Joseph O’Neill’s magnificent novel on cricket and 9/11—the protagonist, a banker adrift in New York, describes his minor successes at the amateur level. These experiences, O’Neill’s narrator writes, “are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me".

The protagonist of O’Neill’s novel was referring to playing, but for those of us more inclined to spectatorship than playing, the same import can be ascribed to one’s first sightings of sporting greatness. I have now greedily consumed sport for two decades, observing and marvelling at feats of athletic virtuosity that will always remain beyond me. Yet no moment has ever remained more vivid than the first.

When the 1996 cricket World Cup came to the subcontinent, I was nine years old. This was perhaps my first immersive experience of sport: men in bright colour pyjamas, wafting across grounds in cities whose names I knew. I followed India’s games religiously; it was the first time I identified with a team, living and dying by its rhythms.

In India’s third league game against Australia at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, India, replying to Australia’s 258, lost two early wickets. It was a formidable total in the pre-Twenty20 days, before flat-bed tracks arrived. The Australian bowlers, impossibly tall and intimidating to my eyes, seemed to be strangling the Indian batting as if this was Melbourne, not Mumbai.

What followed was a Sachin Tendulkar counter-attack as savage as it was surgical. Damien Fleming was driven down the ground. Glenn McGrath was flicked for six over midwicket. Shane Warne was greeted to the crease with a baseball-style swat over his head. His magisterial 90 did not, in the end, get India over the line—Tendulkar got stumped by Mark Waugh precisely at the moment he seemed invincible. But this too was the romance of Tendulkar in the 1990s: a genius in a mediocre team, not unlike a classical hero whose valour and sacrifice remain undiminished in defeat.

Sachin Tendulkar. Photo: Mark Kolbe/ Getty Images
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Sachin Tendulkar. Photo: Mark Kolbe/ Getty Images

The writer Rohit Brijnath has described watching Tendulkar in the 1990s as an experience similar to witnessing Muhammad Ali first-hand in the turbulent America of the 1960s. “You were either there or you were not." It was an experience that became especially heightened in world cups. The occasion, the history, the implications, the demands of a success-starved nation, all this imbued his innings in these with a far greater meaning than in the random thrum of bilateral tournaments.

So much so that from 1996, the story of India in world cups is a mirror image of the story of Tendulkar. He was the highest run scorer in 1996 and 2003; India reached the semi-final and final, respectively. When India emerged as champions in 2011, a 37-year-old Tendulkar remained the World Cup’s second-highest run scorer still. In 1999 and 2007, when Tendulkar didn’t seem at his best mentally or physically, India’s World Cup campaign never really took off.

It is rare to discover a sporting hero in early childhood and still find him somewhere near his peak 15 years later. If I had watched Diego Maradona as a nine-year-old in 1986, he would have been long gone by the time I was 25. So much more special, then, to see Tendulkar’s final World Cup flourish. It was during the 2011 World Cup that Tendulkar scored what I consider his last two great international hundreds.

The first of those—Tendulkar’s 98th century—came in the famous tied One Dayer against England in Bengaluru in the spring of 2011. I saw this innings sitting beside the historian Ramachandra Guha. I had met Ram, hoping our conversation would become part of a travel book I was writing, with the World Cup as its fulcrum. In the circumstances, it was hardly conducive. For the first hour or so, we barely spoke. Our attention was seized entirely by the present, where Tendulkar’s mastery was meant to be received with the fullest attention. Conversation in the middle of this felt not only jarring, but positively detrimental.

Tendulkar’s innings that afternoon had begun in subdued fashion, allowing Virender Sehwag to lay first siege. But once his opening partner perished in the eighth over, Tendulkar began to manoeuvre the innings with the quality of a wily old lion.

At some point after the hour, he changed to a different bat. And then before anyone—or indeed England—realized it, he had begun to bend the game to his will. The gentle lollipops of Paul Collingwood were banished with two straight sixes. This was followed by an absorbing battle with Graeme Swann, before Tendulkar settled the argument in two balls of Swann’s fifth over. To his first delivery, Tendulkar stayed in his crease and lifted the ball over long-on; it landed just in front of where we were sitting. To his second, an identical shot, directed this time towards midwicket, landed deep into the crowd. For the spectator, it was a thrill: to see Swann that afternoon, running out of tricks and ideas, was to be transported back to the summer of 1998 and a slightly obese Warne.

Two weeks later, in the sweltering heat of Nagpur, I saw him compose an even more imperious hundred. This time he faced down the most lethal new-ball attack in the tournament, the South African pair of Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. Tendulkar began in his sedate manner, then exploded into rage.

It was an exhibition in classical attacking batsmanship that could belong to the ages. Still head, high elbow, straight bat—every shot that emerged from Tendulkar’s bat was more or less how the Marylebone Cricket Club had ordained it to be.

One hook of his from that afternoon has stayed with me. After suffering perfectly timed drives through cover and down the wicket for an hour or more, Steyn banged one short. The ball rose sharply towards Tendulkar’s blue helmet, and then, just before the moment of collision, was swatted away behind square for the flattest six I have seen at a ground.

Once the early violent assault was done, he retreated into his meditative rhythm, emerging only occasionally to reveal his contempt for pedestrian and part-time spin. The familiarity of this routine, the inevitability of the hundred as he sailed towards it, masked the great subtle craft that underlay it. So much so that his 99th international hundred, when it arrived in due course, seemed less of an event than what had gone before.

It is somehow fitting that Tendulkar has played all the world cups in coloured clothing, beginning in 1992. It was during this epoch that limited-overs cricket came of age, and for nearly two decades, he remained its resident Lord. He is perhaps the greatest player in the tournament’s history: His tally of 2,257, at an average of nearly 57, is more than 500 runs greater than Ricky Ponting’s (who has played a game more).

Yet what remains with me is not his relentless accumulation, but his desperation to write himself into the tournament’s history, never more than during the spring of 2011. It was almost as if he would not accept that he would depart without a world title. After the final, when Virat Kohli carried Tendulkar on his shoulders around the Wankhede, the press box broke out into spontaneous applause. Yet it was a gesture that did not feel partisan in the least; no player seemed to covet, and deserved, a world title more than Tendulkar.

The world cup feels poorer without him.

Vaibhav Sharma is a writer based in New Delhi.

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Published: 31 Jan 2015, 01:26 AM IST
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