CRICKET:EVERY RELIGION has its heretics. Remarkable as it may seem after 22 years and 32,700 international runs there are plenty of people in India who do not believe in Sachin Tendulkar.
To understand why you have to go back 12 years to the first Test against Pakistan at Chennai. That game, the first Test between the countries in nine years, was played out in a much more fervidly nationalistic atmosphere than yesterday’s World Cup semi-final. India needed 271 to win. They were 18 runs away and Tendulkar was on 136. And then he hit a catch to mid-off. India lost by 12 runs. Ever since the sceptics have reckoned Tendulkar is a great player who has tended to fail on the great occasions.
In the clutch he crumbles – just as in the 2003 World Cup final, when he was caught and bowled in the first over of India’s reply by Glenn McGrath. Or so they say. He averages 55 in one-day tournament finals but the perception has overwhelmed the reality.
In this World Cup he has scored two of the sweetest centuries the competition has ever seen, 111 against South Africa and 120 against England. India did not win either match. The 85 he made here was, in comparison with those masterpieces, pure hack work. After watching one cuffed drive into the covers, one of the elder sages of the press box whispered “that was just like watching Vic Marks bat”.
He had five lives, each earned by a dropped catch, was reprieved by the third umpire after being given out lbw to a ball that would just have slid past leg stump, and the very next ball came within a toenail of being out stumped after being bamboozled by Saeed Ajmal’s doosra.
Perhaps his karma was in credit after his decision to walk against West Indies in the group match. It was surely the worst of his 94 ODI fifties. To drop him once was unfortunate. To do it four times beggared belief.
Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan captain, seemed to go through all five of the stages of grief. Denial as he patted Misbah-ul-Haq on the bum after he dropped the ball at midwicket. Anger as he ran his fingers through his hair when Younus Khan fluffed one at extra cover. Bargaining with the umpires over those referrals.
Depression when Kamran Akmal let an edge fly by his gloves, and finally meek acceptance when Umar Akmal spilled a final chance at mid-off. Finally Tendulkar hit the ball to Afridi who took the catch just in time to save his sanity.
The innings lacked style but it had substance. At the age of 37 Tendulkar is running out of time to prove those doubters wrong. This was the most important and high-pressure match of his career – or at least the most important and high pressure match of his career until this coming Saturday.
It could only have been nerves that made him play that way.
Anyone who wonders just how intimidating the pressure created by a 28,000-strong crowd can be should look at the grovelling apology the International Cricket Council issued to “every single Indian fan” after one of its employees made the mistake of stamping on a balloon that had the Indian tricolour on it. It was, the ICC said, “unacceptable behaviour”. Crisis averted.
Perhaps it was a similar sense of the looming pressure that led the judges to give Tendulkar the man-of-the-match award. Pakistan’s Wahab Riaz was the only player on either side who came close to mastering the conditions, though his team lost.
The tied match against England was the most viewed ODI in history. Certainly enough people were watching for the TV broadcasters to get away with charging €28,000 for a 10-second advertising slot. The estimates, for what they are worth, put the audience somewhere up around the billion mark.
Each and every one of those 85 runs was a rebuttal to those who say he cannot do it when it really counts. Now he will have to do it again, in a World Cup final, in front of his home crowd in Mumbai. He needs one more century to become the first man to have scored 100 hundreds in international cricket. Do not even dare to dream it.
