It is said that people who come with a bang leave without a whimper. But Sachin Tendulkar is a thorough exception. The clanging of bells that started about two months back is finally culminating with a crescendo. Definitely one of the best batsman that world cricket has ever known, questions have been and will be raised about his success rate in winning causes. If you are an avid cricket enthusiast, then you need to treat Sachins batting and Indias performance in a match as two separate entities. The commitment that he had towards the game definitely matched the class he was endowed with. There have been Indian cricketers(treated as legends today with monikers like Colonel et al) in the preceding era who used to muster an average of 20 runs in five consecutive innings only to score a century in the sixth to cement their place for the next few tests. Sachin definitely does not belong to that genre. If India lost a match when Tendulkar scored a century, then the undoing was done by the other ten who failed to perform and not his century. In that memorable Chennai test against Pakistan which we lost by 12 runs, he walked in when only five runs were scored. Only five runs were scored after he walked out. Not surprisingly, he wept in the dressing room. Reminds me of that Amul Ad which said Ten du and ten dont. The type of burden he had to endure in crunch situations was something which no one else would have gone through. Predictably his shoulders used to give way. But thanks to one of the best batting line-up that emerged with the likes of Sehwag,Dravid, Laxman, Yuvraaj and Dhoni, the pressure on him diluted and he was able to score more freely. It would have been a big travesty if India had not won a World Cup during his career. Deservedly he is getting the most noisy send-off anyone has seen. Au Reveoir to The God Of Cricket.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 02:08:57 +0000
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