Sachin Tendulkar turns 35 tomorrow and as he inaugurates his late thirties, it is worth looking at his eighteen and a half year career so far. No other Indian Cricketer has been an India regular for such a long period. Sunil Gavaskar played for sixteen years, Anil Kumble is in his eighteenth year. He has done so without ever being dropped for reasons of performance. I have written about him before, but i never cease to marvel at the sheer relentlessness of his accomplishments. He made Test hundreds on his first tours to England, Australia and South Africa and he is still making hundreds 18 years later – 39 Test hundreds so far. No other batsman has been studied with more care than Sachin Tendulkar – both by worried opposing teams and by observers. It is said that Sir Leonard Hutton saw him play in England in 1990 and immediatly observed that his footwork was amongst the surest he had ever seen. Bradman saw his own image in Tendulkar’s batsmanship. Sunil Gavaskar watched him play in 1987, and at the time declared that the two best batsmen in Bombay were Dilip Vengsarkar and Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar’s batting career is replete with instances where he has been kept in check – mastered even. Bowling line ups have tried many ideas against him. Bowling sides have tried to frustrate him outside off stump, they have tried to frustrate him with slow left arm bowling outside leg stump, they have tried to bounce him, they have tried to cramp him by bowling straight with a packed on side field. Each of these tactics have worked so some degree or another, but Tendulkar has never been mastered. Specific bowlers have troubled him – Glenn McGrath is one. However, there has never been an occasion when some engagement with the bowler’s play on Tendulkar’s part has not been apparent. Amongst his most memorable displays in my view was his effort on the second evening at Adelaide in 1999. He spent 40 minutes ignoring McGrath outside off stump, and later explained that he felt he was in control. On another occasion, he spent a full morning session over 12 runs against Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh in the West Indies in 1997, and on the way back for lunch told his partner Rahul Dravid that he hadn’t been able to read Ambrose’s length at all. Yet, he spend the whole morning pushing forward and managing as best he could, without throwing his hand away. He went on to make 80 or 90 in that innings if i remember correctly. Raymond Price troubled him in India a few years ago with his left arm spin. This was a stage where Tendulkar was unwilling to leave his crease against the spinner. These are the battles which have defined him in many ways. These constitute the ammunition that critics will hurl at him whenever they seek to belittle his efforts. But, at a more fundamental, cricketing level, these are the contests which reveal the unheroic nature of his game. He is nothing if not amazingly dexterous in his use of batting technique. He is able to shift from prominently front foot play, to a more conservative back and across shuffle in the middle of an innings, indeed, from spell to spell. He is able to bide his time and he’s able to attack. There is no trademark Tendulkar way of batting in my opinion. His batting is not about blazing cover drives, or exhilirating stroke play, or dour defense, or gritty survival. It is about all of those, and hence is about something much more fundamental. He is not just an entertainer or just a match-winner or just a technically correct, dependable, classy Test Match batsman. He is truly a cricketer, in the best sense of the word. He lives the contest between bat and ball, and is better equipped than most others to deal with it. He is able to do it without letting his own self get in the way. He has now spend more than half his life as an international cricketer, over the 19 most important years in the modern cricketing era. As Cricket heads into the Twenty20 age, with all its accompanying confusions about sport, entertainment, worth, value and quality, Sachin Tendulkar’s career stands out as what Cricket at its best can offer. He may just be the last of a dying breed – that of the truly great cricketing sportsman.
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