The world’s greatest bowler knows now what India has always known. Sachin Tendulkar is special. He was 16 years old, curly-haired, small and slender, when he was sent out amid the clamour of Karachi’s National stadium to play his first Test innings against a Pakistan bowling attack of fearsome repute. He lasted 28 minutes and managed only 15 runs, but it didn’t matter, India knew.
A week later, Tendulkar faced Wasim Akram and Imran Khan again. This time the venue was the Iqbal stadium in Faisalabad, act two in one of sport’s fiercest rivalries. India were in trouble at 101 for four when the teenager came to the middle. Fifteen years later, Tendulkar has no hesitation in calling it the first big step in a journey that has taken him from child prodigy to one of cricket’s true greats. “My first innings was a disaster,” he recalls. “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 four hours. And although it didn’t win a Test for India, or set the pulse racing, it meant an awful lot to a young man who had been thrown in at the deep end. “I said to myself, ‘You can handle this, it’s not a place where you don’t belong’.” Now he knew.
Fourteen years later, he walked out of the pavilion in Sydney with a reputation to defend against the best side in the world. His previous seven Tests had produced 253 runs, and he had only 82 runs from five innings to show for his efforts in Australia, a land that he had captivated with his batting on two previous tours. Then he had won over the harshest of critics. “I’d like to see him go out one day and bat with a stump,” said Greg Chappell, not a man to hand out praise lightly. “He is 99.5% perfect,” judged Sir Vivian Richards.
But this time it was different. Honest toilers such as Andy Bichel and Brad Williams had worked him over, tempting him with deliveries outside off stump that he chased with the eagerness of a restless newcomer. Sydney, and Steve Waugh’s final Test, offered one last shot. “When I walked out to bat, I decided I wasn’t going to get out,” Tendulkar says. Coming from anybody else, it would sound arrogant, but when Tendulkar says it, you believe. “No matter how long I batted, I wasn’t going to get out. That was the only thing on my mind.”
He batted for 10 hours and 13 minutes, compiling an unbeaten 241, and ensured that Waugh’s last stand would be a rearguard action, a scrap for survival. VVS Laxman played an innings of pristine beauty to charm the aesthetes, but the real highlight was the sheer bloody-mindedness and discipline with which Tendulkar batted, treating deliveries outside off stump as disdainfully as a meditating monk would a flash of cleavage.
“Sometimes, when it’s not clicking, you’ve got to alter your game and your thinking,” he says. “Earlier in the series, I’d tried to play a couple of big shots and it didn’t work. So I told myself, ‘If luck isn’t in my favour, I shall just play accordingly, and cut out that shot’.”
It is an approach that has made a huge impression on opponents and teammates. “You can’t get a more complete cricketer,” was the judgment of Rahul Dravid. Brian Lara is more effusive. “He’s a genius. I’m a mere mortal,” says the West Indies captain.
That exercise in denial in Sydney wasn’t the only reason that he made the headlines in an enthralling contest. Twenty minutes before the final curtain, with Australia seemingly safe, Waugh — who had scripted a typically rousing 80 just when his team most needed it — swept a delivery from Anil Kumble to deep square leg, where Tendulkar wrapped his fingers around it. As 40,000 Australians rose to applaud Waugh’s final innings, Tendulkar didn’t immediately comprehend the significance of the moment. “Honestly, I wasn’t thinking that I had a hand in Steve Waugh’s last dismissal. I was thinking of how we could pull off the win. But once I realised 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.”
That admiration was mutual. Waugh is among those who reckon that Tendulkar is second only to Sir Donald Bradman in the batting pantheon. In return, Tendulkar has relished the heat-of-the-crucible contests against the world’s best team. He feels that too much has been made of the sledging issue. “There have been a couple of instances where you felt that what happened wasn’t good for the game,” he says. “But those things happen on the spur of the moment when you just lose your temper. On the whole, I didn’t feel it was a problem, and I’ve enjoyed playing against them.”
He has especially enjoyed playing in Australia. Scintillating centuries at Sydney and Perth on his first trip there as an 18-year-old earned him a loyal following. “Australia is a great country to tour,” he says. “I find the people very friendly, and they enjoy their game. The atmosphere inside the grounds is totally different to anywhere else. Also, playing the best team in the world makes it even more of a challenge.”
Waugh never did achieve his ambition of winning a series in India, and conquering what he labelled the final frontier for Australian cricket, but Ricky Ponting and his men arrive later this year, perhaps better prepared than any Australia team in living memory. Tendulkar has no illusions about the task facing the home side, despite their victory over the Australian tourists three years ago. “I think it’s going to be tough for us as well,” he says. “Australia are a great side, and they did exceedingly well in Sri Lanka not so long ago. They fought back hard when it looked like they might lose a couple of the Tests. They have a reputation for never giving up, and everyone recognises them as the No 1 side in the world. They deserve that status because they’ve beaten every other country both home and away.”
