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The real premier league: India's billion-dollar cricket revolution


Gambit

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Despite the one-day triumphs, the Eighties brought limited Test success, the side winning just 10 of the 79 matches it played. But at the end of the decade, on 15 November 1989, a diminutive and angelic-looking 16-year-old named Sachin Tendulkar made his Test debut against Pakistan in Karachi. Tendulkar scored 15 in his only innings but, ever since, he has carried the aspirations and emotions of more than a billion people. Winning the World Twenty20 Championship kick-started India's love of 20-over cricket, but it was the World Cup victory of 1983, and Sachin Tendulkar, that ignited the country's infatuation with the sport, a passion that shows absolutely no sign of relenting. Victories are greeted with gifts being showered on the team; defeats are followed by effigies being burnt in the street. Suicide rates are known to rise when the Indian cricket team is performing badly. How Tendulkar has coped with such pressure and expectation is a miracle in itself. India has many social problems, but they are all forgotten and forgiven if the cricket side wins a match or Tendulkar scores a hundred. Harsha Bogle, a highly respected Indian cricket commentator and close friend of Tendulkar, has often said that if either of the above events take place, 100 million Indians will happily go to sleep at night without food. It sounds ridiculous but, amazingly, it would appear to be true.
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