Sachin Tendulkar: Cricket apos;s Peter Pan Must Finally Leave The Stage

EDITOR'S WRAP: Cricket's Peter Pan must finally leave the stage.

Let's just be glad we had him     
By [/home/search.html?s=&authornamef=Sandeep+Bamzai Sandeep Bamzai]
Published: 23:57 BST, 10 October 2013 | Updated: 23:57 BST, 10 October 2013
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comments] Parting is such sweet sorrow: The game of cricket will miss Sachin as much as he will miss it

When Shane Watson breached his defence in the recent Champions League T20 tourney, sending his off stump for an ungainly walk, the corridors of Sachin Tendulkar's mind must have reverberated with the words - it is time to go.

It is hard to imagine watching cricket without Sachin Tendulkar, just as it will be hard for Sachin to imagine life without cricket.

This is part of the circle of life; when Sunil Gavaskar announced his retirement at the very peak of his prowess, I was personally heartbroken. For me, he was inarguably the greatest Indian batsman, and a first among equals worldwide.

Named after music director Sachin Dev Burman by his sister, Tendulkar's brand of mellifluous music transported savants like me to a new zone of delight.




Bombay has always been the home of Indian batsmanship. From the time of the Quadrangular and Pentangular and the gradual evolution of maidan rivalries in Mumbai cricket with tourneys like Times Shield and Kanga League, an assembly line of batters broke through as they tried making their tryst with izzat and shaurat from the great game.



In what came to be known as the Bombay relay race, many actors took their turn to play the Hero - Vijay Merchant, Russi Mody, Vinoo Mankad, Polly Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar, Nari Contractor, Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Sardesai, Dilip Vengsarkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Sandeep Patil, Sanjay Manjrekar et al.




There are others who didn't make the cut - Manohar Hardikar, Vijay Bhonsle, Sudakhar Adhikari, Ramnath Kenny and Amol Mazumdar.

Phenomenon

Taking the baton from Gavaskar was Sanjay Manjrekar as part of a larger guru-shishya parampara.
Middle-class Maharashtrian boys used cricket as a means to get ahead in the hurly burly of life. In fact, history has recorded that Gavaskar's last Test at Bangalore when he played an innings of outstanding quality on a Bunsen against Iqbal Qasim and Tauseef Ahmed and in the very next Test India played against the West Indies at home, a callow youth called Sanjay Manjrekar made his debut.




Soon Manjrekar, known to be classically correct, was joined by Vinod Kambli, Sachin Tendulkar and Pravin Amre, all by-products of the maidan and a regimen of honing their skills on its hallowed turf.


That Sachin Tendulkar outlasted all three, as also his early contemporaries like Graeme Hick, Inzamam ul Haq and even Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting, is a tribute to his durability.

Whether he is the greatest batsman of his generation remains a matter of conjecture.
A joy to millions: Sachin Tendulkar is probably the most destructive one-day batsman the world has ever seen



As a player who relied heavily on hand-eye coordination, slowing reflexes have impacted his career adversely in the last couple of years.

With his sell-by date having expired after the 2011 World Cup victory, he was a passenger in the Indian side.


Long years ago, when the phenomenon first broke through in Mumbai cricket, I remember covering a Ranji game in Aurangabad where Salil Ankola tried to bounce him out.
His jousts with bowlers have now become the stuff of legend. Back then, the little big fella, still not the sharply chiseled Bombay Bomber, caned Ankola, sending him to distant parts of the ground.


I remember him telling me that there was something that welled up inside when facing a bowler.

He wanted to thrash the bowler and give him a pasting. One saw that all the time, this mindset saw the demolition of Henry Olonga, Shane Warne, Glen McGrath, Abdul Qadir and innumerable others at different pit stops - a living testimony to his art of war. His body of work is humungous.



Tendulkar was undoubtedly a titan, a battling gladiator who wore the tricolour on his heart. Equally, he was probably the most destructive one day batsman ever, someone no bowler wanted to do the tango with for long.




His contribution to Indian cricket is unquestioned and unparalleled, but was he as good as Gavaskar, did he win you matches, was Lara a better peer? These are questions which one can debate endlessly, but let us understand that comparisons are odious.



Humility



Many also reckoned that three of the finest batters played under the shadow of the Banyan Tree - Rahul Dravid who has an equally great Test record, VVS Laxman who you could bet your shirt on and Saurav Ganguly, considered one of the best left handed one day cricketers.

The genius of Tendulkar was his humility, always self-effacing and modest.
Finest hour: Sachin is carried by teammate Yusuf Pathan after they beat Sri Lanka in the 2011 Cricket World Cup final



In my mind's eye, I recall my visit to his Sahitya Sahwas residence in Bandra East many moons ago on the eve of his departure to a long tour of Australia, which included the World Cup.

The shy teenager was tongue-tied and https://wikipedia1.org/wiki/Ancestry_Vs._23andMe:_Which_DNA_Testing_Kit_Is_Best_For_Tracing_Your_Family_History reticent, his brother Ajit doing most of the talking on his behalf. The one thing that seeped through from that meeting was that boy wanted desperately to do well in the land of Oz. There was a steely resolve in his uncluttered mind, a resolve to do well against genuine fast bowling.
To his credit, he did.

Dignity
The same feisty attitude and rock hard temperament allowed him to dominate bowling attacks. And despite all this, my sense is that Tendulkar would believe that he is an under-achiever.

That is blasphemy I know, but one cannot ignore the visions of Brian Charles Lara that have plagued Tendulkar for most of his career. He has a better overall record than Lara, but he would have liked to essay some of the Trinidadian's knocks.


It will be grossly unfair to say that Tendulkar played for himself; no he played for us - all of India.

He played with dignity and precision and like Peter Pan never aged.


In the two books that I have authored on the societal impact of cricket, Tendulkar has been the centrifuge. Just as I lived through Gavaskar's cricket, I enjoyed the sight of Tiny Ten making a fist of it.




Gavaskar once told me that the best batsmen have always been short, because they have a low centre of gravity which allows them better balance, functionality and strokeplay. Sachin typifies that. Salut!


The writer is Editor, Mail Today