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Sachin Tendulkar tribute thread

Sidhoni

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Chandan Newbie

Chandan

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Sachin would have listened to his heart - Dravid Former India captain Rahul Dravid on Sachin Tendulkar's retirement from Test cricket October 10, 2013 http://www.espncricinfo.com/india/content/video_audio/678683.html Rob's tribute to Sachin: GzjVDaRFLzg&sns=tw Tendulkar to be remembered as one of the greats http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-11/tendulkar-to-be-remembered-as-one-of-the-greats/5016386?section=sport BZnCV51CUAAH406.jpg .

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Chandan Newbie

Chandan

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http://goo.gl/TA90js Here's a piece from 2001 where I compared Sachin to WG, the Don, and Sobers, as a cricketer who defined His Age: RAMACHANDRA GUHA A shilling for the doctor RAMACHANDRA GUHA Fifteen million Englishmen loved W.G. Grace. Bradman was idolised by 10 million Australians, Sobers worshipped by a like number of West Indians. But Sachin Tendulkar is answerable to billion hyper-expectant and too-easily dissatisfied Indians. IT was half-past two in the afternoon, and Sachin Tendulkar had just come to the wicket. In 15 minutes I had to take my son to the doctor's. The first ball was allowed to pass through to the keeper, but the second was played past cover's left hand for four. We exchanged glances, and I got on the phone. Alas, the doctor was booked the whole of the following week. We had to take it and leave it: leave Sachin, that is. Bu the time we got back 45 minutes later, Tendulkar was out. We hadn't missed much, but we would rather have not missed anything. For neither of us is likely to see his like again. This little fellow towers over his contemporaries. In cricketing terms, he defines the Age; indeed, he is the Age. In the history of the game there have been only three other cricketers who, in terms of skill and social impact, can be compared with him. There was, to begin with, the bearded doctor William Gilbert Grace. Grace was the first batsman to play all round the wicket: as his friend and contemporary K. S. Ranjitsinhji pointed out, before him batting was like a one-stringed lute, after him it became a many-chorded lyre. Grace could bat and he could bowl; he took more than 2,000 first-class wickets. And he could field; usually at short point, looking down hard and meaningfully at the batsman. He was mammoth in size and personality, a vigorous extroverted and often domineering character who was the best-known Englishman of his time. Once, when Grace's county came travelling to Lord's, the management put up a sign outside the ground: "Admittance sixpence; a shilling if the doctor is playing". The next player for whom one could comfortably double the admittance fee was Donald George Bradman. He brought to the art of batsmanship a clinical and almost frightening efficiency. "The glorious uncertainty of cricket," claimed Neville Cardus, "is not threatened by Bradman." The Don remains the only cricketer to have an entire strategy worked out against him. The strategy was called bodyline, and it was reckoned to have worked, since it brought down his batting average to a mere 56. On Bradman's tours of England, one Australian official was exclusively deputed to answer his letters. The Don never played in this country, but was adored here nevertheless. He retired in 1948, and five years later decided to make another visit to England, as a journalist. As it happens, his aircraft made an unscheduled stopover at Kolkata's Dum Dum airport. Word got around, somehow, and within minutes there were 5,000 cricket-crazy Indians on the tarmac, screaming for him. Bradman hastily got into an army jeep and took refuge in a barricaded building. After Grace and Bradman came Garfield Sobers. He started out as a slow left-arm spinner, took to batting, and then also to swing bowling. All along he fielded superbly, in the slips or at short leg. His great contemporary and rival Hanif Mohammed claimed "God has sent Sobers down to earth to play cricket". He was, without doubt, the most accomplished and variously gifted man ever to grace this most graceful of games. Sobers won matches with the bat, with the ball, and oftentimes with both bat and ball together. He broke a sheaf of records as well. Yet his impact would never be reckoned in quantitative terms alone. When, in the summer of 1996, he scored 722 runs in a Test series against England, and took 20 wickets and 10 catches to boot, the novelist J. B. Priestely wrote that "it was not only his feats with bat and ball that compelled my applause; it was his style and manner; the way he carried himself, the way he moved". Where Grace and Bradman were single-minded in their pursuit of success, Sobers did not appear to play to win; though his side most often won nevertheless. His cricket and his personality were marked by charm and sparkle. The enjoyment was visible, and the sportsmanship self-evident. He was a creature of the 1960s, the cricketing counterpart of that other combination of fun and genius, the Beatles. Sachin Tendulkar, however, is more like the Don, utterly focussed on the job at hand. One would never see him, as one often saw Sobers, practice a golfing stroke in the field. Or, as one too often saw Sobers, in a nightclub at play's end. But we must not be judgemental; greatness has many avatars, and we must learn to cherish and equally respect all of them. Certainly no one since Bradman has had quite such a range of strokes, quite such an ability to dominate attacks quick and subtle, on wickets dusty or green. Moreover, in social terms he has had to bear a burden the others could not even remotely contemplate having to carry. Grace was loved by 15 million Englishmen. Bradman was idolised by 10 million Australians, Sobers worshipped by a like number of West Indians. But Sachin is answerable to a billion hyper-expectant and too-easily dissatisfied Indians. Future cricket historians will speak of the Age of Tendulkar, as we speak of the Age of Grace and the Age of Bradman and the Age of Sobers. What is particularly nice about these four representative men is that they happen to represent four different countries, indeed four separate continents. Yet, and this is what marks them out from everybody else, one never had to share the colour of their passport to revel in their greatness. J. B. Priestley naturally wanted the West Indies to lose, but watching Sobers, "admiration came seeping through the mud walls of partisanship". And, as Suresh Menon has written, when India plays its old enemy at cricket "the ideal solution for many Pakistani spectators is for Tendulkar to score 100 and Pakistan to win".
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littlemaster1982 Newbie

littlemaster1982

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Two very good articles

A fine balance The year was 1996, the venue was Edgbaston in Birmingham, and I was there. England won that game by eight wickets, and it was a low-scoring affair, too. However, the reason I, and many others, remember that game is the way Sachin Tendulkar set about the hapless English bowlers in the second innings. On a fourth-innings pitch that offered everything and more to the seamers, and made the ball seam and swing, Sachin single-handedly took the fight out of a marauding Chris Lewis. Of the team score of 219, he made 122. The second highest scorer was Sanjay Manjrekar, with 18. The discipline and focus required for an innings of such calibre are perhaps at odds with flair and aggression, yet Sachin displayed plenty of both. What struck us all was his complete fearlessness in the face of a hostile bowling attack with blood on their mind, and his refusal to call it a day, even as his fellows departed in a steady procession from the other end. That temperament, I believe, can only belong to someone whose technique makes him well-nigh invincible, should he so choose. It is the approach of someone who has visited, and conquered, weaknesses that have felled many lesser players. I have seen so much of Sachin over the years that I now find it impossible to pick and choose my 'Sachin moments'. To give a random example, I recall him getting ready to tackle Shane Warne during an Australian tour of India. Conventional wisdom would dictate that Indian batsmen get ready to counter Australian pace, given the state of things, but conventional wisdom would be wrong. What sense does it make to plan for pace when the pitches support spin? Sachin was perhaps the only member of the team who understood that. And he took the trouble to ask Laxman Sivaramakrishnan to bowl at him, round the wicket, into the bowlers' rough. The results are history, cliches be damned. I remember that practice session largely because it impressed upon me Sachin's unorthodox intelligence. Here was a batsman who had spotted a possible loophole and was working on it. He wasn't going through the motions as many do, no matter how hard they practise. Practice alone does not make you perfect. Only perfect practice makes you perfect. If you're practising the wrong things, you are merely getting better at being wrong. For the greater part of his career, Sachin has displayed this uncanny ability to practise right. And that has translated into footwork that is a coaching manual's joy. If you ignore the bumpy ride of the past year and a half-and you should because that was simply nature doing its job—I have never seen him put a foot wrong. Like a well-trained dancer, Sachin has, time after time, got into the best position to play a shot. That's because, as I was telling British Prime Minister David Cameron recently, you need to get your feet set first. The arms and hands simply follow. In Sachin's case, the footwork becomes even more important because, like Sunny Gavaskar, he is a small man. And small batsmen take smaller strides when they play forward. If your footwork isn't right, and your step is just about a foot and a half and you are too far away from the pitch of the ball, the outcome can be fatal, not least because you're caught at the crease and rooted to the spot. During his best time, which was pretty much all the time barring the past 18-odd months, I have never seen Sachin caught at the crease. Ever. But those feet have finally stopped moving as well as they should, I feel. And that's what time is all about, isn't it? The other aspect of Sachin's technique that has always delighted me is his judgement of length. I probably do not need to explain this, but we've seen so many players play back when they should be playing forward, and vice versa, that this bears repetition. Even a player of the calibre of Mahendra Singh Dhoni nicked one to the wicketkeeper during the recent Kolkata Test against the West Indies because he stayed back instead of coming forward. That isn't something you would normally associate with Sachin. The lad just possesses a sublime sense of length. And that's all, really. Footwork and judgement of length. These are, or ought to be, the basics of any good batsman's technique and the beauty of Sachin's game has always been that he has kept things simple. This is largely what has allowed him to play any kind of bowling on any kind of pitch. This is also what allows him to play those perfect drives, cuts and pulls with minimal expenditure of energy. That economy of movement comes from hours upon hours of dedicated practice, whereby perfectly orthodox technique wins over on-the-spot, sometimes desperate, innovation, every time. For anyone who cared to notice, Sachin's feet were always aligned wicket to wicket, bat perfectly in line with the off stump, the back-lift enabling the release of the bat and a cocking of the wrists. The fact that he hits with such power can be attributed to the perfect transfer of weight as well as the release of his wrists at the top of his bat swing. You can also sense that there is a definite plan behind each and every innings, that technique is subservient to Sachin's assessment of the game, and that he isn't using technique simply for the sake of it. While this may not be actually possible, he gives the impression that he has thought every innings through, prepared for every ball, studied every individual bowler, and conducted a personal risk assessment for every shot. All of which make him a game controller, and a game changer on occasion. There is no shame in the gradual decline that Sachin has been going through. And I completely understand his desire to continue to play. Through all the ups and downs, Sachin Tendulkar has never stopped enjoying himself. And now that he has finally called it a day, the judgement, as usual, is perfect.
Why was it so tough to bowl to Tendulkar? Picture this: A genuine fast bowler streaming in from the top of his run-up. Tall, big-built, face covered in white paint; his hands and legs moving in rhythm as he gains in pace with every stride. It's a sight that often keeps batsmen awake the night before a Test match, shuddering at the prospect of what they will face the next morning. Now picture Sachin Tendulkar at the crease. His crouching five-foot-five frame looking even smaller. His bat aligned with the off-stump. His gentle eyes peering from behind the visor. It's a wonder how this benign vision has turned out to be the most fearsome image for bowlers around the world for more than two decades. What is it that makes Sachin such a huge problem to tackle? How did bowlers approach a match knowing they would come up against his straight drives, his horizontal bat strokes, and his silken flicks? How hard, really, was it to bowl to him? Waqar Younis, who had famously struck Sachin on the face with a bouncer in the fourth Test of his debut series at Sialkot, says the oft-recounted incident only tells a fraction of the story. "First, I don't think the ball hit him as hard as it's been portrayed. I was bowling at around 145 kmph but it went off the glove before it struck him. He went down, we had a chat, shook hands, and he was up in a minute, ready to play the next delivery," the former Pakistan captain told India Today. The episode, Waqar says, turned out to be an aberration. The 16-year-old boy they had first heard about from Ajay Jadeja during India's under-19 trip of Pakistan just before the 1989 tour, didn't allow himself to be dominated ever again. "I remember we didn't think too much when we had our first team meeting. There were other important guys to worry about: Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Mohammad Azharuddin, Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar. By the end of the trip, his image within our team had changed entirely." Over the next few years, as India and Pakistan started playing one-day cricket on a regular basis, all talk in the Pakistani dressing room would be about how to counter Sachin. "We'd realised that if we didn't get him out in his first few overs at the crease, he could do a great deal of damage." Waqar says that Sachin had no particular chink in his armour to begin with, and his technique got only better with time. "As a fast bowler, you set a batsman up, bowl different deliveries in a pattern, and then induce him into a false shot. Sachin was much better than any other batsman I've bowled to at reading that pattern. But I always felt that more than any other delivery, he was slightly vulnerable to the ball coming into him at good pace early on in his innings." Allan Donald, another great fast bowler of the 1990s, had heard so much about Sachin's prowess before India's tour of South Africa in 1997 that he turned to West Indies pacemen Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, who had got Sachin out lbw on a few occasions, for help. "Generally fast bowlers don't give away their secrets, but they knew what I was up against, and were nice enough to talk to me about Sachin," he says. Ambrose and Walsh told Donald to bowl fuller and make him play a majority of the deliveries early on in his innings. They said that he just sits pretty at his crease and leaves the balls he doesn't need to touch. "They suggested I bowl full and slanting in from outside the off-stump," says Donald. The ploy worked, but only on occasion, considering that Sachin got a big century in the series. Donald dismissed him just once in three Tests. As Sachin's career progressed at an astonishing pace around the mid-1990s, the hardest thing was how to prepare against him. Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar, who began his Test career in dramatic fashion by dismissing Rahul Dravid and Sachin off successive deliveries in 1999, says he knew he needed to treat Sachin differently from all other players. "I never sledged him while he batted against me. There are some players who are better off left alone. Players like Sachin will only hit back harder." Akhtar says he has no qualms in admitting that most of his plans against Sachin fell through. "I would think that if I bowled like this, he will play like that, and then I will stand a chance. At the 2003 World Cup, I tried to bowl short outside the off thinking he would pull me. Instead, he decided to cut me over point for six. It was a shot that made me famous," Shoaib laughs. "Then I decided to bowl at his body, and he flicked me away. I bowled full to him and reversed the ball, he drove straight." That's how he unsettled most bowlers. Javagal Srinath, who has bowled to Sachin perhaps more than any other bowler in the nets and in domestic cricket, says the only preparation you could do against Sachin was to ensure your mind was always ticking. If you had a set plan, he would always outsmart you. If you didn't have a counter, he would run away with the game. "From my experience, I can remember only Fanie de Villiers, the South African fast bowler, who could think one step ahead of Sachin and beat him regularly," Srinath says. The Indian quick, who shared the dressing room with Sachin for more than a decade, says Sachin knew the bowlers' tricks so well that he would keeping telling batsman at the other end what the bowler would do next. "He would say, 'Ab yeh upar dalega (Now he will pitch it up)' or 'Thoda chota marega (The next one will be a little short)'. He would be right 90 per cent of the time," says Srinath. There is no doubt that Sachin had his flaws. But it was his ability to iron them out that kept him one step ahead. During India's tour of Australia in 2003-04, he offered the ultimate example of this quality by scoring 241 runs in Sydney by cutting out the cover-drive completely from his repertoire. That's what the art of batting is all about-playing to your strengths and minimising your weaknesses. That's what let a tiny little man tower over the world of cricket for as long as Sachin has done.
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Chandan Newbie

Chandan

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http://goo.gl/Uy9Lth WHEN DO YOU THINK IT'LL SINK IN? by Deepak Narayanan Published 11 October 2013 1286327_AMN.jpg SACHIN TENDULKAR It won’t sink in yet, even if you’ve known it’s been coming for a while. It won’t sink in because, right now, you’re still grappling with such mundane questions as to whether he left it too late, whether he spoilt his legacy by stretching his career pass sell-by date, or why he let his Test average drop to just over half a Bradman. It won’t sink in yet because of how long it’s been stretched out – from the moment India won the 2011 World Cup, and a nation willed him to “retire on a high”, to Thursday afternoon, when a Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) press release announced the inevitable in two paragraphs. It won’t sink in yet because you’re probably convincing yourself it doesn’t matter anymore; for you, Sachin was done two years ago. You had seen it coming, after all. You saw it in the year-long wait for his 100th hundred – the longest Sachin Tendulkar had gone between three-figure scores in 20 years of trying. He tried everything at the time: some innings he approached with the fearlessness of a teenager, swatting, slashing, slicing at each delivery that came his way; at other times, he left everything, even juicy half-volleys, alone with what can only be described as Mumbai khadoos-ness. As you waited, watching knock after knock believing this was going to be the one, it grew increasingly clear the epic was nearing its end. Even the way he finally got there was a dreadful anti-climax: a man who effortlessly carried the hopes of a nation for two decades, weighed down by the pressures of a meaningless, manufactured landmark. You saw it coming as he tried, and failed, to conquer England and Australia in eight successive Tests. There were few little gems, mini-masterpieces, sprinkled over the depressing landscape – a smooth-as-silk 91 in a lost cause at The Oval, an oh-so-promising 80 in Sydney. But he just couldn’t conquer the big-inning demons, and that’s when you knew he was done. After all, Sachin had gone through bad patches before, but he’d always found a way out – most magnificently at Sydney in 2004. Having got out playing airy cover drives a few times, Sachin surgically cut the off-side out of his batting vocabulary – suppressing all he had learnt over 15 years, disobeying every instinctive grain in his body, allowing half-volleys and half-trackers through to the ’keeper, on his way to 241. You thought of that innings as he fought now to go past 60 and 70 over eight unbearably long Tests, and you knew the end was close. You were prepared. And if any confirmation was needed, you got it when he announced his retirement from one-day cricket – right before a series against Pakistan! Take a deep breath here, and think of Sachin versus Pakistan: a 16-year-old battling on having been bloodied by a bouncer, and later on that tour cutting Abdul Qadir and his leg-spinning ego into millions of tiny little pieces; in Chennai, battling a rotten back to take India to the brink of victory; in Multan, stranded on 194 not out; at the Centurion, slashing Shoaib over point. What better stage to take the final bow? What are you hanging around for? You saw other signs. You knew the end was closer than ever when Nathan Lyon – Nathan Lyon! – had him in all sorts of trouble this year (remember when Sachin used to chew up off-spinners for fun?). You gave up when the three-figure scores dried up. There was a time in the 90s when you could bet on only two things with certainty when Indian teams travelled overseas: one, they’d get walloped, and two, you’d get to see at least one Sachin century. You stayed up late and woke up early so you wouldn’t miss those. Now he had gone three series without a ton. This wasn’t the Sachin you grew up with, and by logical extension, this unrecognizable Sachin’s retirement didn’t count. ******* You’re right, it’s been coming for a while. However, while you might convince yourself you’re fine, it’s only because the news hasn’t really sunk in yet. This retirement will adamantly continue to not sink in as we tick off days in the calendar, counting down to November 14; it will continue to not sink in even though every conversation over drinks will end up as arguments over which of Sachin’s 100 centuries was the most memorable; in fact, it won’t even sink in when he walks off the field after his 200th Test. It’ll sink in when India play South Africa. It’ll sink in when the second wicket falls and Sachin doesn’t walk out to bat. It’ll sink in when, instead of a familiar roar when the number 4 walks in, we’ll hear an unnatural silence. Because that is the essence of Sachin, the stuff you want to bottle and preserve – the buzz as you watched him walk to the middle, the jangling nerves as he took guard, the audible “uff” in the stands as he leant regally into another straight drive. Convince yourself otherwise, but you – we – will only truly know what a Sachin-shaped vacuum feels like when we’re finally in it. ---------------------------------------------------------- http://goo.gl/dfOAQJ
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