Feature

The 2011 World Cup was the final time one saw Tendulkar in full bloom

Vaibhav Vats

04-Nov-2013

During the last World Cup, as India battled England at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, I was looking for the historian Ramachandra Guha. Given the variable nature of the rules for what spectators can carry into the ground, Ram had told me earlier that morning he would not be carrying his cellphone inside. Now an hour into the game, I stood in the Members Stand, assessing the task ahead of me. The stand contained several thousand people. I wandered the aisles, scrutinising row after row, drawing suspicious, and occasionally hostile, glances. And so it went, until I finally spotted Ram in one of the front rows.

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'You cannot prepare for Tendulkar'

Tendulkar's opponents are his fans too. Here, two young Haryana players talk about what it was like to bowl to him and talk to him during their Ranji game in Lahli

Interviews by Nagraj Gollapudi

03-Nov-2013

For two decades now Sachin Tendulkar has been a role model to younger cricketers. Two of those from Haryana, Harshal Patel and Jayant Yadav, who played against Tendulkar in his final domestic match in Lahli during the first round of Ranji Trophy earlier this week, talk about their experience of watching and playing against Tendulkar.

Harshal Patel, 22, fast bowler
Sachin Tendulkar addressed the Haryana dressing room after our first-round match. I pounced on the opportunity to ask the first question: what could we have done differently? Tendulkar said we could not have done anything more, because everything we had done was very good. He told us the bowlers and the plans had actually put pressure on Mumbai and him. That is why it took Mumbai 93 overs to chase a target of 240. He said luck didn't go our way and that if he had nicked one, the match might have had a different result.

I had bowled against Tendulkar in the IPL, but bowling in a Twenty20 match is so different from bowling in a first-class game. I prepared for this match like I would prepare for any other, but I was excited to bowl against him and I was hoping to get him out. His wicket was crucial in the second innings, because he was the only one who could take the match away from us in those conditions. Unfortunately we failed to get him out.

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Dangerous pitches, and a first-ball six

Before Tendulkar shot to fame at the first-class and international levels, he set the Mumbai club circuit on fire

Devashish Fuloria

02-Nov-2013

They say if you were good enough to survive in the top division of Mumbai's Kanga Memorial Cricket League, the Ranji Trophy would turn out to be a piece of cake.

The Kanga League, a club tournament, has a storied history. Wet, uncovered pitches, matches in the rain, tall grass in the outfield, and no helmets meant the conditions favour bowlers as heavily as they do batsmen in the modern international game.

Sachin Tendulkar made his Kanga League debut at age 11 in the G division, in 1984, for the John Bright Cricket Club. Ramakant Achrekar, Tendulkar's coach, was so confident of his abilities that he told John Bright's owners that Tendulkar would only be available for a year.

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A Zen master

Tendulkar seems to have the ability to remain untouched by the circumstances of the match or the personality of the bowler

Simon Barnes

01-Nov-2013

Many of Tendulkar's batting records may be broken in the future but one that may stand the test of time is his feat of achieving a 100 hundreds. In Sachin: Cricketer of the Century, Network18 journalist Vimal Kumar spoke to team-mates, opponents, coaches, and journalists to chronicle Tendulkar's journey. The following extract is a piece by Simon Barnes.

The most important thing about Sachin's batting is that there is no single important thing to say about it. He doesn't really have a style. In a sense he doesn't even have a personality: or, to be more accurate, personality is something he seems to be able to set aside at will. He seems to have the ability to remain untouched by the circumstances of the match or the personality of the bowler. Poor bowling doesn't get him excited at the chance to cash in; very good bowling in helpful conditions doesn't make him worry. He doesn't really do situations at all: he just bats.

More than any cricketer I have ever watched, he has the gift of playing only the ball. He's never surprised by a bad ball from a great bowler nor by a dangerous ball from a poor bowler. He somehow keeps the bowler out of the equation: the ball is all. He meets it all with the same bland eye. You can't tell whether it all matters hugely to him or whether it doesn't matter at all. He has the very rare gift of playing in the moment. Some players love drama, confrontation, imposing their own personality on a great match, a great occasion. Sachin just hits the damn ball.

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The Sachin I know

A veteran journalist who has known Tendulkar for over 25 years talks about the man behind the public persona

Sunandan Lele

31-Oct-2013

It was January 2010. We were in Pune and I had helped organise an event where about 50 blind kids could meet Sachin Tendulkar. They had no idea he was coming. To introduce him, I asked Sachin to knock a ball on a bat. As the noise resonated around the walls of the school, I asked the students: "Who is the emperor of cricket?" In unison, they screamed "Sachinnn!" As soon as they were told he was standing among them, they went manic.

During the interaction one kid asked Sachin to talk about his assault against Shane Warne in the late 1990s in Sharjah. The kid pointed out that Warne, recollecting the match, had said Tendulkar had become a nightmare and used to haunt his dreams. Drawing the kid closer to him, Sachin said: "After being hit so much, how did Warne sleep in the first place?" All the kids just jumped up laughing.

The first time I met Sachin was in the 1988-89 season, during a Ranji Trophy match in Hyderabad. I was then working for a popular Marathi fortnightly called Shatkar. Despite the difference in our ages, of ten years, we have grown into dear friends. With time, the trust has grown deeper, and I have always spoken my mind to him. In this period I have managed to cross the fence that separates a player and a journalist. So I can say I know a little bit of the other side of Sachin.

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The hand-speed of a boxer

ESPNcricinfo staffers pick their top Tendulkar shot

29-Oct-2013

The upper cut, Bloemfontein, 2001
Sharda Ugra: It's not thought of as a Sachin Tendulkar classic but needs to be: competitive temperament shaking hands with a deeply understood technique. It came not from 10,000 hours of practice but ten-plus years in the game. Many have played it since, but it first turned up on our TVs from Bloemfontein in 2001.

It was pulled out of his pocket, out of his imagination. Not a silk handkerchief of wristy Asian clichés, but a red rag from a batsman with the footwork and hand-speed of a boxer. The brute statement of the square cut given some air and trajectory, the distance covered with the kind assist of pace and bounce. No half-measure "uppish", this had to be called "upper", because it came from that kind of drawer.

Above the shoulder, above the eye-line, bat glinting like fencing foil, wrist flicked, above the slip cordon, into the fence. A horizontal bat shot created by a batsman born in a land of vertical, sinuous strokeplay. Then it vanished for 18 months. His brain, his eyes and his bat waited. Until Centurion, the World Cup and Shoaib Akhtar. Go ahead, make my day.
Sharda Ugra is senior editor at ESPNcricinfo

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Tendulkar's last Test

A bit of verse for Tendulkar's farewell match

Mukul Kesavan

29-Oct-2013

Squat, visored knight, armoured in storied deeds,
Uses his bat's butt-end to shift his box,
Takes guard, gardens for invisible weeds,
Looks up, thanks Dad, ignores two wheeling hawks
No higher in their heaven than him on turf…
Buoyed by devotion's thermals, desis surf.

A hundred runs, two hundred, maybe three,
Will help delete the demi from their god
Give us this day a valedictory
Explosion, oh, let Bombay's sacred sod
Be his last proving ground, his portal,
To that rare rank: Certified Immortal.

Immortals can't cite age as their excuse,
Swansongs must scale the summits of their pomp;
To fail is to invite unhinged abuse
From second-hand men who dimly romp
Through heroes' lives and will go starkly mad
Without that brilliant youth we never had.

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'I never saw him get irritated'

VVS Laxman chats about how much he learnt from Sachin Tendulkar, and about the time he changed his stance, walked in to bat and scored a brilliant Test hundred

VVS Laxman

29-Oct-2013

We had already heard a lot about Sachin Tendulkar when we first saw him. He had come to Hyderabad to play a Ranji Trophy match for Mumbai, and I was practising with the Hyderabad Under-15 then. I had seen Sachin on Cricket with Mohinder Amarnath, a television show in which Amarnath would explain technique and interview players. Amarnath had interviewed Sachin at Shivaji Park.

In Hyderabad, Sachin scored 59 at the Ensconce Cricket Club, where I played. The club belonged to Arshad Ayub, the India offspinner, who would tell me how this 15-year-old kid was playing against world-class bowlers. He would give Sachin's example to motivate me. With every innings, Sachin was becoming more and more popular. He was an inspiration for all of us growing up in that era.

In 1994, I had a very good series against the Australia and England U-19 sides. Some months later I met Sachin for the first time when I was playing for Hyderabad and he was playing for Wills XI in the Wills Trophy. I was surprised when he congratulated me on my performances against the youth teams, surprised to know he had an eye on domestic cricket. It turned out that Sachin kept up with domestic cricket through his friend and Mumbai team-mate Amol Muzumdar.

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A touch of Viv

In his youth, Tendulkar was the kind of attacking batsman who would have set T20 ablaze, had the format existed

Sanjay Manjrekar

24-Oct-2013

I was privileged to watch, from very close quarters, a child prodigy go on to become a true legend of the game. A batsman who stunned the world with his voracious appetite for the game and for making hundreds.

Sachin Tendulkar has only played a single international T20. His exploits in the format were all in the IPL and at the Champions League. You will agree that his impact on the shortest format of the game has been less than that on the others.

T20 cricket came into Tendulkar's life a little too late and cricket is slightly poorer for that. Had T20 come into the game when Tendulkar was in the youth of his batting career, he would have been one of the most dangerous T20 batsmen in the world. Sure, he would not have hit the ball as long as Chris Gayle does, but he would have given the bowlers the same kinds of nightmares.

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A one-man happiness index

It's hard to imagine a cricketer who has shared as profound a bond with such a large number of fans. We at ESPNcricinfo know this first hand

Sambit Bal

23-Oct-2013

It would be a travesty if Sachin Tendulkar's career is remembered for his numbers. It is unthinkable that two of his statistical peaks - 100 international hundreds and 200 Tests - will ever be bettered, but numbers are a somewhat cold and impersonal way to remember sporting heroes by.

They are best remembered by the memories, by the way they touched our hearts and lit our lives. And on that count, Tendulkar is unlikely to ever be surpassed. If India, like Bhutan, measured its Gross Happiness Index, Tendulkar would be the single-largest contributor to it for the best part of his 24-year career.

Everyone is partial to a certain memory. Mine is from a 20-over match. But it was years before 20-over matches became the fashion. In 1989, ESPNcricinfo was yet to be born, mobile phones were unheard of, India relied on IMF loans to build bridges, the Berlin Wall still stood, and the six was a rare and spectacular sight. The World Cup had been won, but hope was still the oxygen for Indian cricket fans: we dared not expect. A 16-year-old schoolboy making his international debut in Pakistan? With the memory of Javed Miandad's last-ball six in Sharjah still singeing, Indian fans merely prayed for safe passage.

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